The Self And The Dramas Of History

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The Self AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

Books by Reinhold Mebuhr

CHRISTIAN REALISM AND POLITICAL PROBLEMS

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

FAITH AND HISTORY

DISCERNING THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES

THE CHILDREN OF LIGHT AND THE CHILDREN OF DARKNESS

THE NATURE AND DESTINY OF MAN (ONE VOLUME EDITION)

CHRISTIANITY AND POWER POLITICS

AN INTERPRETATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS

MORAL MAN AND IMMORAL SOCIETY

The Self

AND THE DRAMAS
OF HISTORY

Reinhold JViebuhr

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
New York, 1955

COPYRIGHT 1955
BY REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Printed in the United States of America

All nghts reserved No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form without
the permission of Charles Scnbner's Sons

Library of Congress Catalogue No. 55-7197

foU.M.N.

Contents

Part

1. THE UNIQUENESS OF THE HUMAN SELF 5

2. THE INTERNAL DIALOGUE OF THE SELF 6

3. THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE WILL AND CONSCIENCE

OF THE SELF 12

4. THE LADDER OF THE SELF'S AMBITIONS, DESIRES AND
QUALMS OF CONSCIENCE 20

5. THE SELF IN SPACE AND TIME 23

6. THE SELF AND ITS BODY 26

7. THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE SELF AND OTHERS 30

8. THE SELF AND ITS COMMUNITIES 34

9. THE SELF AS CREATOR AND CREATURE IN HISTORICAL
DRAMA 41

10. THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY 44

11. THE PROBLEM OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE 53

12. THE SELF AND ITS SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE MEANING 61

Part

13. THE HEBRAIC AND THE HELLENIC APPROACHES TO

THE PROBLEM OF SELFHOOD AND HISTORY 75

14. FAITH AND DOGMA IN THE NEW COVENANT COM-
MUNITY 89

vii

Viil THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

15. DOGMA AND ONTOLOGY IN THE CHRISTIAN CON-
SENSUS ^

16. THE SELF AND ITS DRAMAS: REASON AND NATURE IN

THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE MEDIEVAL SYNTHESIS 105

17. UNDERSTANDING NATURE AND MISUNDERSTANDING
HUMAN NATURE H2

18. THE CLIMAX OF AN EMPIRICAL CULTURE: ITS BLIND-

NESS TO SOME OBVIOUS "FACTS" 127

Part

19. THE RESOURCES OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN A
DYNAMIC CIVILIZATION AND AN EXPANDING SOCIETY 147

20. ORGANISM AND ARTIFACT IN DEMOCRATIC GOVERN-

MENT 163

21. PROPERTY, SOCIAL HIERARCHY AND THE PROBLEM

OF JUSTICE 183

22. THE INTEGRATION OF THE WORLD COMMUNITY 202

23. INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE DESTINIES IN THE CON-
TEMPORARY SITUATION 217

INDEX 243

Preface

.his volume, written in two years of enforced leisure, elab-
orates a theme which was subordinate in some of my other
books, but which I never developed fully. I acknowledge my
indebtedness to the great Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber,
whose book I and Thou first instructed me and many others
on the uniqueness of human selfhood and on the religious
dimension of the problem. I make this acknowledgement ex-
plicitly because I have not recently studied the remarkable
book which prompted my original interest and I have there-
fore not done justice to it in the text of this volume.

I wish also to acknowledge with gratitude the rigorous
criticism which every chapter received from my wife, fre-
quently resulting in changes in both form and content; and
to my secretary, Mrs. Nola Meade, whose faithfulness, care and
accuracy in transcribing my rough copy into a presentable
form, tremendously eased my labors.

Reinhold Niebuhr

IX

Part \

THE DIALOGUES OF THE SELF WITH
ITSELF, WITH OTHERS AND WITH GOD.

THE FREEDOM OF THE SELF WHICH
MAKES THESE DIALOGUES POSSIBLE. DRAMA AS
THE HISTORICAL DEPOSIT OF THE DIALOGUES. IS
THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE SELF AND GOD REAL
OR IMAGINARY?

Chapter |

THE UNIQUENESS OF THE HUMAN
SELF

M,

. an Is obviously distinguished from the other
creatures by some marked capabilities and qualities. In the
Western tradition, composed of Hebraic and Hellenic compo-
nents, Hebraism supplied the poetic metaphor to designate
human uniqueness. In the Bible it is affirmed that God made
man "after his image and in his likeness." This assertion of the
divine element In human nature was however not elaborated,
except by implication. It was left to the Greek philosophers
to define the uniquely human more precisely. They did so
by equating the divine element In man with his "reason."
Aristotle further defined the rational capacity as the ability
to conceive universals, in short, the capacity for making con-
ceptual Images. But reason also meant for Aristotle, and for
all of Western thought since his day, the logical and analytical
faculties of the mind. With these man distinguishes things
from each other, traces the causal sequences in which they
are chained and, having separated distinctive things, tries to
bring them into some kind of coherence. Obviously the rational
faculty is a very significant part of the unique capacity which
is indicated by the metaphor "image o God."

3

4 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

The question is whether any of these classical definitions
adequately describe the unique capacity for freedom of the
human person. Conceptual tools are no doubt necessary for
the self s freedom over the flux of natural events and for pro-
jecting ends beyond those set by natural appetites and desires.
The self must even use concepts to make itself, as the world,
the object of its attention. It uses memory, a force of "reason"
which neither Plato nor Aristotle completely understood, to
transcend its movement through time and be aware of its self-
identity in this temporal flux. Plato and Aristotle did not
quite understand memory because they equated "recollection"
with the conceptual and mathematical forms which the mind
used in mastering the rough stuff of its perception. But the
significant power of memory lies in its capacity to retain
unique events whether they fit into a conceptual mold or not.

Let us define the uniqueness of the human self by empha-
sizing the three dialogues in which it is involved according
to the Hebraic rather than the Hellenic description of its
reality. The implications of these three dialogues may give
more accurate content to the original metaphor "image of
God" than the Greek emphasis on reason. The self is a crea-
ture which is in constant dialogue with itself, with its neigh-
bors, and with God, according to the Biblical viewpoint.

(A) The dialogue of the self with itself is an empiric fact
in the sense that every astute person must admit that such a
dialogue goes on in the internal life of the self, though there
are no external evidences of this dialogue. This internal dia-
logue is a more significant testimony of the self's freedom over
nature than its endowment with conceptual capacities, though
these are frequent instruments of the self in the dialogue.

(B) The self is in constant dialogue with various neighbors.
This may be a quality which Aristotle was partly describing
by defining the self as a zoon pohticon. But that definition
would not necessarily do justice to the endless nuances and
levels of the dialogue of the self with others. It is not merely
dependent upon others for its sustenance and security. It is
dependent upon them for the image which it has of itself and

THE UNIQUENESS OF THE HUMAN SELF 5

for the spiritual security which is as necessary to the self
as its social security.

(C) The self is in dialogue with God. Perhaps this asser-
tion will immediately prejudice our analysis in the eyes of
those who have drawn heavily upon either naturalistic or
idealistic versions of the Greek tradition. The assertion that
the self is in dialogue with God takes the inquiry immediately
beyond the limits of empirical verification. It would seem
so much safer to follow Aristotle and define the uniqueness
of the self as its reason, a definition which is capable of em-
pirical verification. Let us therefore make some at least
preliminary concessions to the spirit of contemporary empiri-
cism and say merely that the self imagines itself in an
encounter with the divine. For surely the persistence of this
imagination is an empirical datum about the self. Perhaps
we can be even more moderate and declare that the self dis-
tinguishes itself by a yearning for the ultimate. For if we omit
this characteristic we have failed to define the total anatomy
of human selfhood. We must leave the more exact definition
of what this may mean to a later consideration. It is sufficient
now merely to call attention to the fact that any datum which
illumines the indeterminate character of the self's capacity
for transcending itself, its history and its world is necessary for
an adequate conception of the anatomy of human selfhood.

Chapter 2

THE INTERNAL DIALOGUE OF THE
SELF

We

e may safely say that the human animal is
the only creature which talks to itself. It maintains a rather
constant internal dialogue in which it approves or disapproves
its actions, or even itself. Its accusations and defences of itself
are quite different from those in which it engages in its ex-
ternal dialogues. The self pities and glorifies itself as well as
accuses and excuses itself. It could not carry on this dialogue
without using its "reason"; for the dialogue means that the
self in one of its aspects is making the self, in another of its
aspects, its object of thought. It uses conceptual images for
this procedure.

But it is important to note that the self which is doing the
judging and excusing, the pitying and glorifying, is not neces*
sarily the "rational" or the "intelligible" self in contrast to the
"sensible" self. It was the primary mistake of the philosophers
from classical days to this day to equate the self as subject
with mind; and the self as object with either the body, or the
body-soul unity, or with some other aspect of the self as
creature. The fact is that there are not two distinct selves in
this internal dialogue. There are merely two foci of the same

6

THE INTERNAL DIALOGUE OF THE SELF 7

self. We do, of course, know of a pathological condition in
which the self becomes separated into two warring and com-
paratively discrete entities. This is known as "schizophrenia/'
There are pathological states which border on this internal
division. But the healthy self is always one self, no matter
how much it engages in a perpetual internal dialogue.

The dialogue within the self proceeds on many levels.
Sometimes it is a dialogue between the self as engaged in its
various responsibilities and affections and the self which ob-
serves these engagements. Sometimes the dialogue is between
the self in the grip of its immediate necessities and biological
urges, and the self as an organization of long-range purposes
and ends. Sometimes the dialogue is between the self in the
context of one set of loyalties and the self in the grip of con-
trasting claims and responsibilities.

When artists try to depict a character in a novel or drama,
they frequently resort to the record of this internal dialogue
because it may be more revealing than the self's external dia-
logue or dramatic action. With artistic license they claim to
be privy to the secrets of this dialogue, though it is by its
very nature secret; and the self which entertains ambitions and
desires is subject to temptations and considers alternative
modes of action about which even the most intimate friend
may know 'nothing. Only the victorious, and not the van-
quished, forces are known to the outside world. The self
remains such a mystery even to its friends because so little
is known about the stratagems which produced the victory
of the one over the other force.

An interesting witness to the reality of the self's inner dia-
logue, and more particularly of the phenomenon of the self
as spectator of its actions and attitudes, is furnished by Lucy
Sprague Mitchell in her biography of her husband and her own
autobiography, entitled Two Lives.' 1 Speaking of her adoles-
cence, she writes: "It was at this time that I became aware
of the complexity of one's make-up. When I acted in our

i Simon and Schuster, Inc.

S THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

stable-theatre I seemed to be two people: one making up dra-
matic lines and rendering them in fine action, and the other
listening, approving or disapproving. I was actor and critic
at the same time. I found that this was disturbingly true,
whatever I did. When I talked with father or helped mother
with household arrangements, I always heard and saw myself
doing these things. I must be hopelessly insincere, I always
thought. But the sense of guilt did not change me one bit. So
vivid this inlooker self became, that I called it 'the thing in
the corner/ Among my old papers I find a curious document,
written in my fourteenth year and beginning: *Tis seldom
that one personality speaks to another. Even more rare is it
that one's other personality speaks to another personality.
Too seldom alas, for more often than not they speak another
language." Obviously this is a very significant memory of a
vivid experience of childhood, and throws a bright light on
the anatomy of selfhood which is superior to the analyses of
many learned men.

The analyses of Freud and of subsequent "depth psychology"
into the inner tensions of the human psyche have both illu-
mined and obscured this inner dialogue. They have illumined
it insofar as the analyses proved conclusively that the old
"body-mind" separation was mistaken; and that the inner
organization of the self is much more intricate than was sup-
posed.

The Freudian division of the self into "id/* "ego" and
"super-ego" indicates at least two levels of the dialogue, that
between the self in the grip of its immediate necessities and
the self in its more inclusive and coherent organization; and
that between the self as concerned with itself and the self in
its relations to the community. It also proves that the dialogue
may leave many scars. The therapeutic efficacy of depth psy-
chology rests largely upon the discovery that a part of the
"unconscious element in the ego" is but the repressed por-
tions of a preconscious desire. Freud, in fact, denied the free-
dom of the will, partly because he was so preoccupied with
the limiting forces upon the will by neurotic anxieties, which

THE INTERNAL DIALOGUE OF THE SELF 9

he attributed to the baneful effect of repression. Sometimes
Freud pictured the task of analysis to be that of freeing the
"ego" from the limits placed upon it by the "id" and the
"super-ego." The task of psychoanalysts is, he declares, "to
strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-
ego, to widen its vision and extend its field of organization so
that it can take over portions of the id. Where the id is, there
shall the ego be." 2

For all of the therapeutic skill of Freudian psychology, and
its wisdom in exploring the labyrinths of the self, it has con-
fused the realities of the internal dialogue in some degree by
obscuring the fact that the self is really in both the "id" and
the "super-ego." The "id" is defined as a cauldron of "seeth-
ing excitement." But it obviously has the guile of a real self
in trying to evade the guard of the "ego's" "censor." Sometimes
Freud pictures the tension between the "ego" and the "re-
pressed" portions of the self. Inasmuch as neuroses are due
to these repressions, it is important to bring this repressed ma-
terial into the open consciousness. The tool of emancipation
is the recollection of the experiences in which the repressions
took place. Freud notes that the resistance to this process of
recollection is offered by the conscious self. "There is no
doubt," he declares, "that the conscious and preconscious ego
subserves the pleasure principle. It is trying to avoid the pain
which would be aroused by a release of the repressed mate-
rial." 3 Thus the self is in this dialogue between the "coherent
ego" and the "id" more than it would at first appear.

The presence of the self in the dialogue between the "ego"
and the "super-ego" is even more mistakenly obscured. This is
obviously a debate between the self as engaged and obligated
to its various communities and the self concerned with its
own ends. But the Freudian psychology moves within the
limits of a rigid naturalism; and this second level of trans-
cendence is not conceivable within those limits. The "super-

Introductory Essays on Psychoanalysis, p.
s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p 20.

20 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

ego" is therefore no more than the pressure of society upon
the "ego"; and it does not occur to Freud that the self has
both the power to defy the community for the sake o its inter-
ests and for the sake of interests more inclusive than those of
a given community.

The inclination to ascribe the sense of social responsibilities
to the external pressure upon the self and to imagine the self
resisting these pressures, makes Freudianism pessimistic about
the possibility of extending any kind of social discipline to
the extent required by modern society. This pessimism is ex-
pressed in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. The con-
viction prompts the conclusion that there is a tremendous
amount of "aggression" stored up by the weight of the "super-
ego" and also by the "cultural super-ego/' Since there is no
possibility of channeling all this aggression, Freud is sceptical
about the problem of eliminating conflict in life. This curious
conclusion has persuaded our social, as well as psychological,
sciences to such a degree that some of them have become prac-
tically irrelevant to the serious task of dealing with conflicts
of interest on every level of politics and economics. It is cer-
tainly not relevant to deal with the monumental collective
egoism of nations, compounded of many genuinely historical
cumulations; of illusion, and power lusts, as if they were
merely the aggregate of individual "aggressiveness." Thus a
discipline, which has proved itself therapeutically efficient in
dealing with pathological states of individuals, has been be-
trayed into the inanity of speculating whether the Germans,
Russians and Japanese could be cured of their "aggressiveness"
by a sufficiently wide application of psycho-therapy.

Freud himself has had some curious evidence of the reality
of the self, which he initially obscured in his analysis. He
thought, for instance, that many forms of anxiety neuroses
were due to traumatic experiences in youth, chiefly of a sexual
nature. He was finally made suspicious by the indicated exces-
sively high rate of incest which was confessed in these recollec-
tions; and it dawned upon him that the confessions were bogus
and merely betrayed the incestuous desires of the patients in

THE INTERNAL DIALOGUE OF THE SELF 11

their youth. 4 In the same fashion a modern psychologist 5
reports, on the one hand, that the analysis of specific causes
has banished the idea of a transcendent self from the consid-
eration of causes as successfully as an earlier natural science
had banished God; but, on the other hand, he cautions against
the possibility of the banished and guileful self, manipulating
the tools of analysis for its own self-justification.

Incidentally, the emphasis put by modern psychiatry upon
the voluntary cooperation of the patient and the futility of
forcing submission to therapy is another indication of the im-
portance of the banished self and of the reality of the freedom
which has been denied.

The inability of Freudianism to comprehend the reality of
a free self prompts it to reduce the problem of guilt to the
manifestation of neurotic guilt. Neurotic guilt may be defined
as the sense of guilt due to fancied violations of arbitrary
norms. It has little to do with the sense of guilt, arising from
the self s violations of norms accepted by it as valid and vali-
dated by the experience of other men. It also tempts psychiatry
to reduce all forms of egotism to vestiges of childish egocen-
tricity which greater experience will correct. Thus an approach
to the self which is therapeutically adequate for pathological
aberrations of selfhood is incapable of comprehending the real
problems of the self on either the political or the religious
level.

The dialogue which the self carries on within itself is cer-
tainly more complex than understood in classical philosophy.
Depth psychology has uncovered many of these complexities.
But it has no doubt obscured many others because it failed
to grasp that the same self is in the various personae of the
dialogue.

* Ernst Jones: Life and Work of Sigmund freud.
$L. F. Shaffer: Psychology of Adjustment.

Chapter

THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE WILL
AND CONSCIENCE OF THE SELF

T,,

.he relation of the conscience to the will of the
self is certainly one aspect of the self s internal dialogue. Will
and conscience are two levels of the transcendence of the self
over itself. More accurately, the will is the result of the self's
transcendence over the complex of its impulses and desires.
The will is in fact the self organized for the attainment of
either a short-range or long-range purpose. This organization
requires a rational analysis of the ends in view, a comparison
of the relative merits of those ends either from the standpoint
of the self s total ends or from the standpoint of some more
inclusive system of value. The will is operative on all levels.
A young man may, for instance, will to be a lawyer; will to
take a college education in pursuit of this ultimate end; and
will to join the football squad. He may will the latter course
either in pursuit of the ultimate end, or because it is an ancil-
lary end which is deemed by him not to be in conflict with
his ultimate end. On all these levels of willing reason is the
self s instrument in judging the goals of action. Yet the con-
sistency with which a self pursues its immediate ends and sub-
ordinates them to an ultimate end is not an intellectual

12

THE WILL AND THE CONSCIENCE OF THE SELF 13

achievement. Consistency is the achievement of the self rather
than of its reason, because there is no power in reason as such
to compel consistency though it may have the power to detect
inconsistency in the pursuit of goals.

The self's capacity to view itself, and to judge either its
short-range or its long-range purposes, gives rise to a reality
in its life which is usually termed "conscience." Conscience,
like will, avails itself of rational tools but is not subject to
these instruments.

It would seem that any judgement by the self of its own
actions and attitudes is an expression of conscience. But this
is not so. The self may, when viewing its actions, either accuse
or excuse itself; and if it accuses itself, it may do so from its
own standpoint. That is, it may view its actions as being too
"unselfish" and not sufficiently concerned with its own
interests.

In short, the self in the position of viewing its own actions
is not inevitably expressing its "conscience." The prevalent
view that there is some identity between conscience and reason
is due to the error of assuming that the self in the position of
transcending itself inevitably has a wider concern than the
self in its engagements. It has a wider view, but not necessarily
a wider interest. The fact is that the self which views its own
actions and attitudes is more inclined to be concerned for
itself than to judge itself for this concern. We must postpone
for the moment a consideration of this aspect of self-tran-
scendence to consider the manifestations of "conscience," par-
ticularly in its relation to the will. We will define conscience,
provisionally at least, as any aspect of the self's judging its
actions and attitudes in which a sense of obligation in con-
trast to inclination is expressed. Many efforts have been made
to deny the reality of such a sense of "ought." Most of these
efforts are clearly derived from one-dimensional views of self-
hood, usually elaborated within a naturalistic ontology. They
try to eliminate the distinction between the desired and the
desirable in the view of the self. But they fail to explain why
the self is under the necessity of seeking what it desires by

14 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

proving that the desired is really desirable; or that what the
self wants is in accord with some wider system of values than
the self's own interests. These hypocrisies are the most telling
refutations of one-dimensional views of selfhood. They prove
that there is a real distinction between inclination and obliga-
tion, between the desires o the self and its conception of a
system of value which does not depend upon its inclination
or desires. This sense of obligation is powerful enough to allow
the self freedom to achieve what it desires only when it is able
to persuade itself that what it desires is consonant with this
more general system of values.

The "content" of conscience is obviously very relative to
time and place. Yet the minimal terms of our obligations to
our neighbors, incorporated, for instance, in the prohibition of
murder, theft and adultery, are fairly universal. Hume rightly
observed that the "preference for benevolence over self regard"
was universal, certainly more universal than actual benev-
olence.

Perhaps it would be correct to surmise that the universalities
of the "moral law" are derived from intuitions of the self
about the essential nature of its selfhood. To this essential
nature belong, on the one hand, its biological structure, and,
on the other hand, its social nature. The self would therefore
feel obligated to conform to the "law" written into its nature,
including the law of love or the law which is derived from the
mutual dependence of persons.

Yet the content of conscience is much more relative than
the proponents of the idea of "moral intuitions" realize.
These relativities point to the social derivation of the moral
law. Man is both an historical and social creature. He does not
make his moral judgements in a vacuum. The community in
which he lives sets the standards by which he judges himself.
There is at least that modicum of truth in the moral rela-
tivism propounded by modern anthropologists. That this is
not the whole truth of the matter is proved by the frequency
with which "conscience" expresses itself in defiance of the
community. The modern martyrs who have given their life to

THE WILL AND THE CONSCIENCE OF THE SELF 15

defy communities which, sought to make total claims upon the
individual have vividly refuted all theories, whether psycho-
logical, sociological or anthropological, which sought to reduce
the sense of moral obligation to a purely sociological phe-
nomenon. More particularly they refuted the Freudian theory
of the "super-ego" which was no more than the pressure of
the community upon the "ego."

It is worth noting however that consistently "liberal" or
"bourgeois" notions of conscience as purely individual do not
do justice to the fact that the individual is best able to defy
a community when his conscience is informed and reinforced
by another community, whether religious or political. Perhaps
the final paradox of the social and individual dimension of the
moral sense is revealed by the fact that the individual may
defy a community which directly impinges upon his life and
threatens his liberty by its coercions; but his defiance is usually
undertaken in the name of another, more inclusive or more
worthy, community even though that community makes no
overt claims upon him and may exist only in his imagination.

John Wheeler Bennett's study of the history of the German
military caste in his Nemesis of Power is an interesting survey
of the relation of "conscience," both to the pressure of self-
concern and to the historical traditions which may inform a
conscience. According to this study, the military caste which
had strict conceptions of "honor" and a personal ethic which
made Nazi practices abhorrent to it, was nevertheless the chief
instrument for letting Hitler come to power, and came to an
ignominious end, first as partner and then as captive, of the
Nazi regime. This result was partly due to the fact that the
traditional moral code of its members assumed the predatory
character of the nation's morality. There was thus a partial
concurrence between their and the Nazi morality. They were
secondly motivated by a strong pride of caste which Hitler
finally outraged, but initially satisfied, by giving them a seem-
ingly exalted position in the "Third Reich." They were, in
addition, so politically inept, that they were unconscious of
having given the noose into Hitler's hands, which he used to

/ THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

hang them. This noose was their own exaggerated conception
of 'loyalty/' and their abhorrence of breaking an oath of al-
legiance. Thus the inadequacy of the moral traditions which
informed their conscience was equally responsible with their
political ineptness, their lack of personal political integrity,
and their personal and collective pride in making them the
chief agents of their nation's undoing. Yet there were signifi-
cant variations in the general pattern of the tradition which
informed their moral life. There was a great difference between
the integrity of a von Seekt and the capacity for intrigue of a
von Schleicher. And the heroic courage which finally made a
revolt against Hitler possible was only slightly different in
composition from the character traits which made the caste
such an ignominious instrument of Hitler's regime. No better
symbol could be had in history of the infinitely varied relation
of conscience to communal moral tradition, on the one hand,
and of conscience to self-concern, on the other.

Since it is the self which wills and the self, on another level
of transcendence, which judges what it has willed, there is
naturally some confusion about the relation of will to con-
science, illustrated in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice in the
account of the dialogue between Launcelot Gobbo and his
conscience. In St. Paul's confession of the division in his soul
(Romans 7) , conscience is, on the one hand, a force above the
self ("The law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin")
but, on the other hand, the self identifies itself with conscience
and feels that there is a force of inclination which operates
against both will and conscience ("I, yet not I, but sin that
dwelleth in me") .

This confusion is heightened by the fact that conscience may
become "divided" because it is at different times informed by
contrasting sets of loyalties and operates in different contexts
of moral claims. Mark Twain is very much interested in this
confusion. In his Huckleberry Finn, he pictures "Huck" anx-
ious in one moment because telling the truth would deliver
his friend the runaway slave, Jim, to his pursuers, and in the
next moment uneasy because he has told a lie. Huck there-

THE WILL AND THE CONSCIENCE OF THE SELF 17

upon cries out against this confusion: "It don't make no dif-
ference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience
ain't got no sense and goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller
dog and he had no more sense than my conscience I would
poison him. It takes up more room than all a person's insides
and ain't no good nohow. Tom Sawyer says so too/'

The relation of conscience to reason is an even greater
source of confusion. We have seen that the self, both in its will-
ing and in its judging, avails itself of its logical and analytic
faculties. In willing, it uses logic to avoid confusion in the
organization of its aims. It also avails itself of reason to detect
the contradiction between its aims and desires and a larger
system of values of which it has become conscious because it
can survey itself in its relation to some larger communal or
moral system in which its desires are not as central as they
seem to be in its unreflective state.

But it is important to note that the self is always the master,
and not the servant, of its reason. That is why reflection is not
identical with the operation of conscience. Reflection may
prompt a greater self-concern than an unreflective engagement
of the self in its responsibilities and affections. The self is, in
fact, more, rather than less, inclined to be concerned with itself
when it detaches itself from a situation and views it from a
transcendent position. This fact gives at least a provisional
justification for the lower estimates of the moral quality of
"reason" which romanticism advances. 1 It also explains why
Hobbes, with some plausibility, could regard the same reason,
which philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Kant regarded
as the root of virtue, as the cause of the inordinancy of human
ambitions. It was, according to Hobbes, man's "reason" which
disturbed the simple harmony of nature. Men by their reason
"saw or thought they saw" a better way of organizing their
common life. This usually meant organizing to their greater
advantage. The self, in short, could use reason to justify its
ends as well as to judge them, and there was evidently no

i Bergson: "When the self first begins to think of itself it thinks of
itself first/*

18 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

power in reason to limit the desires and ambitions of men.
There was no rationally compelling analysis o a complex so-
cial situation which could compel the self to moderate its
claims in the interests of the whole. The inclination of the self
to use its freedom over self and the communal situation to
press its claims rather than to moderate them, proves the inade-
quacy of all theories which equate self-concern with some
inertia of nature or some vestige of infant ego-centricity. The
chief difficulty in the Freudian analysis of the self is that it is
blind to the resources for both love and self-love at the very
heights of human personality, rather than m a pleasure seek-
ing "id."

The universal inclination of the self to be more concerned
with itself than to be embarrassed by its undue claims may be
defined as "original sin." The universality of the inclination
is something of a mystery. The orthodox idea of an inherited
sinful taint certainly can not explain this tendency. Nor is
it meaningful to follow theologians, who, since Origen, have
reduced this tendency to an ontological fate and have thus
equated the fall with creation. The simple survival impulse
may be grounded in our created nature. But we are consid-
ering, not the survival impulse, but the tendency to consider
ourselves whenever we rise to survey the whole human sit-
uation. We will understand the nature of this universal in-
clination if we note that it expresses itself on many levels,
so that its universality does not indicate a uniformity in human
behavior. It expresses itself in the action of the deserter, whose
self-concern tempts him to evade the risks of war. But it is
also revealed in the attitude of the brave soldier who may,
upon enlistment in the Army, anxiously speculate on the possi-
bility of attaining officer rank. A person may be thoroughly
"devoted" to a cause, a community, or a creative relationship,
and yet he may, within terms of that devotion, express his final
concern for his own prestige or power or security. This bond-
age of the will to the interests of the self is what is meant by
the "bondage of the will" in Christian theory. There is a sig-
nificant confusion in regard to this conception, well illus-

THE WILL AND THE CONSCIENCE OF THE SELF 19

trated in the debate between Luther and Erasmus on the free-
dom and the bondage of the will. Erasmus, in common with
Renaissance thought, conceived of the freedom of the will as
the freedom of the self over its impulses. The Reformation,
on the other hand, defined the bondage of the will as the
bondage of the self to its self, from which bondage there could
be emancipation only by "grace" and not by the strength of
one's willing.

Chapter 4

THE LADDER OF THE SELF'S AMBI-
TIONS, DESIRES AND QUALMS OF
CONSCIENCE

JL he self's capacity to view every situation in
which it is involved, and to view itself from a standpoint be-
yond the situation makes for the indeterminate character of
all human desires and the corresponding indeterminateness of
the qualms of conscience about the legitimacy of those desires
and lusts. The self is usually assumed to be "rational" in the
exercise of its freedom over natural necessities. But since the
self has a freedom beyond its rational capacities it can sub-
ordinate its reason to its desires. It can do what Hobbes evi-
dently equated with the idea of "rational." It can use its reason
to prove its ends legitimate. In short, both desires and qualms
of conscience about the desires are indeterminate; and both
are the fruit of the self s capacity to transcend every situation,
historical or natural, which offers either preliminary restraints
upon its ambitions, limits for its desires or justifications for
its undue selfishness.

Thus a civilization, which is technically efficient as ours is,
sets no limits to the standards which technics may achieve
in establishing the security and comfort of the self against the
hazards of nature or of history. Some of the eighteenth- and

20

SELF'S AMBITIONS, DESIRES, QUALMS OF CONSCIENCE 21

nineteenth-century dreamers were under the illusion that the
triumphs of science, particularly of the medical sciences, would
finally change the whole human situation by extending the
limits of life set in the traditional "three score years and ten."
Time has proved these hopes to be illusory. The brevity of
man is an inexorable fate which science can not eliminate.
But men will continue to exploit the possibilities of comfort
and security above this limit. In this enterprise both the crea-
tive desire to master nature and the more egoistic impulse to
achieve comfort and power are variously compounded.

There are, in the same fashion, no limits to the possibilities
of refining a culture or expanding the treasures of art and
science. The purely formal disciplines of culture will expand
without limit until a romantic revolt against formalism reveals
the perils to spontaneity in the formal disciplines. Everything
in human life its interests, ambitions, lusts, and fears tends
to expand without limit because man has the capacity to
survey any cultural or historical situation from a vantage point
which does not take its standards wholly for granted; and he
has therefore the ability to imagine a more perfect goal or
more consistent application of a technique or a more satisfying
fulfillment of desire.

These limitless possibilities apply as much to the individual
as to a culture or community. There are no limits to human
ambitions or securities. Whether people have one house or
three or five, and whether the house boasts of two or twenty
rooms, is not determined by some logical principle or some
primary need because human desires always transcend elemen-
tary needs. The scope beyond the primary need invariably
includes cultural as well as purely physical values.

This ladder of ambition and achievement is inevitably ac-
companied by a ladder of anxiety. The poor man is anxious
lest he lack sufficient income to satisfy the basic needs of his
family. The rich man is anxious that he may not be able to
conform to the living standards of his neighbors. He is also
anxious lest envy of his wealth destroy, rather than enhance,
respect for his person. Human anxieties grow with achieve-

22 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

ment and the anxieties contain both concern for the adequacy
of the social or artistic achievement and for the social prestige,
which may follow upon the achievement either contempo-
raneously or ultimately.

The two-fold nature of anxiety reveals that conscience is
subject to the same indeterminateness as ambition. In school
or college the young people with moderate gifts are anxious
lest they fail in their tests. The more gifted are anxious about
the position which they may hold in their class. And, in their
anxiety there is a mixture of concern about the adequacy of
their mastery of a particular subject and about the social pres-
tige which may be the fruit of their scholastic attainments.

The very creative personalities, who may have succeeded
in surpassing every social or historic standard, are not satis-
fied by this attainment because they have both the ability and
the inclination to set themselves more severe standards,
whether on aesthetic or moral issues, than those which society
sets. This mood of anxiety could be partly defined as "con-
science/* The qualms of conscience are just as indeterminate
as the lust and ambitions of men, ranging from the man of
easy conscience because he has desisted from a previous crime,
to the man who has an uneasy conscience because his privileges
are inconsistent with a standard of justice which he has set
for himself, or because he is involved in a social evil from
which he sees no escape, or from which a little more coura-
geous action on his part might offer the way of escape.

There are, of course, all sorts of pragmatic ways of limiting
the limitless desires of men both for justice and for self-expres-
sion, both for self-realization and self-giving. But the limits
are provided on the whole by the counter forces of history and
of life. A purely "rational" solution is impossible because the
contingent factors in every situation are too numerous.

Chapter

THE SELF IN SPACE AND TIME

.here can be no question, of course, that the
self is an object among other objects in space and time. It has
its dated existence at some particular time and in some par-
ticular location. The conditions of time and space, of age
and environment determine its character to a large degree.
But the self also rises indubitably out of the situation of
time and place. As Hocking observes, it is in time but it also
has time within it. By its memory and foresight it transcends
the given moment and is therefore transtemporal in one di-
mension of its being. It is also spaceless in one dimension. The
self-consciousness of the self proceeds in a particular organism.
But the self is, in one dimension, non-spatial. Its imagina-
tion is free to rove over the boundaries of time and space to
which it is bound. But it is more important to note that self-
consciousness is ultimately non-spatial. This is a great embar-
rassment to any rational conception which must insist on the
coherence of the various entities with which it deals. The non-
naturalistic philosophers of Greece sought to eliminate this
scandal by interpreting the self as "reason" and assuming rea-
son to be the "form" of the spatial world. There was a plausi-

23

24 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

ble reason for this procedure. The self undoubtedly possesses
a rational faculty; and the rational faculty measures the struc-
tures of the spatial world. The power of mathematics to unlock
nature's secrets filled the mind with wonder from Aristotle
to Leonardo da Vinci. This coherence between a non-spatial
mind with the forms of space therefore seemed to offer a clue
for the solution of the seeming absurdity of a non-spatial
entity. The mind is non-spatial, but it is congruent to the
dimensions of space. It furnished the forms for spatial objects.
That was why mathematical calculations could solve so many
problems of spatial relations.

Actually this answer is no real solution for the problem of
the self which is more complex than mind and has a more
integral and discrete existence. The principles of reason are
universal; and idealists of all the ages have sought to swallow
up the self in these rational universalities. But the integral
self is a highly particular entity which resists these efforts. Yet
they have been accepted from Greek rationalism through the
whole modern idealistic tradition. Hegel involved himself in
all kinds of absurdities in his effort to prove that the real self
was not the particular self but a self of universal mind. Kant's
"Ego of Transcendental Apperception" is obviously no ego
at all but merely the universal principles of rational procedure.
Fichte combined romantic with rationalistic influence to
project something that obviously had some of the inner vitality
of a true self rather than pure mind, but he produced an even
more absurd idea when he supposed that this finite self was
capable by its own will to create itself in absolute validity.

The fact is that there is no escape from the "rational ab-
surdity" of the real self because it is at once in time and
beyond time. It is spatial and yet non-spatial. And there is no
sharp distinction between its spatial and non-spatial dimen-
sions. Yet this double fact, which outrages the sense of rational
coherence, is a fact of daily experience. The philosophers since
Plato and Aristotle have eliminated the absurdity of the self
which is in time and yet beyond time and space by reducing
self to mind and identifying mind with form and thus estab-

THE SELF IN SPACE AND TIME

25

lishing it as congruent to space and time. Modern psychology
has no such simple way out o the dilemma. It is committed
to the study of the empirical self as the object of its study. If
any part of that object seems to elude it, the inquiry becomes
embarrassing, for only an object in space and time can be
the subject of scientific study according to its own presup-
positions.

Chapter

THE SELF AND ITS BODY

self is not a particular self merely because
it is in a particular body. It can take a partially objective view
of its body just as it can of its mind. But it has an internal
relation to its body as to its consciousness which makes the
idea of "my body" different from the idea of "my property."
There is an organic unity in every animal organism which is
usually described as its "soul." The self is "soul" insofar as
it has an experience of the unity. But it is more than soul
insofar as it can think of its body as an object even while it
is an inner experience of the bodily organic unity.

In Charles Lindbergh's account of his memorable flight
across the Atlantic two decades ago, 1 he gives an admirable
account of the unity and the difference between the self and
its body and its mind. The statement occurs in his description
of his effort to master physical fatigue after thirty hours of
flying across the Atlantic. He writes: "For immeasurable
periods I seemed divorced from my body as though I were
an awareness, spreading through space, over the earth and into

i From The Spirit of St. Louis, by Charles A. Lindbergh; copyright
1953 by Charles Scnbner's Sons, used by permission.

26

THE SELF AND ITS BODY 27

the heavens, unhampered by time and substance, free from
the gravitation that binds men to heavy human problems of
the world. My body requires no attention. It's not cold. It's
not hungry. It's resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have
I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back
at Long Island or St. Louis, while this weightless element that
has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the
planets. This essential consciousness needs no body for its
travels. It needs no plane, no instruments, no engine. Only
the release from flesh, which the circumstances I have gone
through, make possible. Then what am I? The body substance
which I can feel with my hands and see with my eyes? Or am
I this greater understanding and greater realization which
dwells within it and extends to the universe outside; a part
of all existence, powerless but without need of power; im-
mersed in solitude yet in contact with all creation? There are
moments when the two appear inseparable and others when
they can be cut apart with the mere flash of light.

"While my hand is on the stick, feet on the rudder and my
eyes on the compass, this consciousness, like a winged mes-
senger, goes out to visit the waves below, testing the warmth
of the water, the speed of the wind and the thickness of the
overhanging clouds. It goes north to the glacial coast of Green-
land, over the horizon to the coast of Ireland, England, and
the whole of Europe, away through space to the moon and
stars, always returning unwillingly to the mortal duty of seeing
that the limbs and muscles have done their duty while it was
gone." 2

There could hardly be a more perceptive analysis of the
essential aspatial nature of the self, combined with its intimate
relation to a body in a given space. Mr. Lindbergh goes on
to describe the conflict between the fatigued body and the
resolute will: "With the faint trace of day an uncontrollable
desire to sleep falls over me in quilted layers. I've been staving
it off with difficulty during the hours of moonlight. Now it

^ Ibid., p. 353.

28 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

looms all but unsurmountable. This is the hour I've been
dreading; the hour against which I've tried to steel myself.
I know it is the beginning of my greatest test. . . . I've lost
command of my eyelids. When they start to close I can't re-
strain them. . . . My body has revolted against the rule of
the mind. . . . Every cell in my body is in revolt, sulking in
protest claiming that nothing, nothing in the world could be
worth such effort; that man's tissues were never meant for
such abuse. . . . I've got to muster all my reserves, all the
tricks I've learned, all the remaining strength of mind, for the
conflict. . . . I've got to find some way to keep alert. There's
no alternative but death and failure, I keep repeating, using
the thought too as a whip for my lagging mind, trying to make
my senses realize the importance of what I am saying. ... I
set my mind on the sunrise and try to think about that. It
will be better when the full light of day has broken. The
desire for sleep will give way to the waking habits of the day
. . . shaking my body and stamping my feet no longer has
any effect. I'll have to try something else. . . . My eyes close
and open and close again. I'm beginning to understand that
a new factor has come to my assistance. It seems I'm made of
three personalities, three elements, each partly dependent and
partly independent of the other. There is my body which
knows that what it wants most in the world is sleep. There is
my mind constantly making decisions, that my body refuses
to comply with. And there is something else, which seems to
become stronger rather than weaker with fatigue, an element
of spirit, a directive force which has taken control of both
mind and body. It seems to guard them as a wise father guards
his children . . . when my body cries out that it must sleep
the third element replies that it may get what relaxation it
can but that sleep is not to be had. When my mind demands
that my body stay awake it is informed that alertness is too
much to expect under these circumstances. . . . But while it
must not expect alertness on the body's part, it can be con-
fident that there will be no sleep/'
This is as illuminating an account of the constant inner

THE SELF AND ITS BODY 29

dialogue in the self as we have in modern literature. It is to
be noticed that "my" body is at one time an object among
other objects, and in another mode it is different from all
other bodies because of its internal connection with the self.
It participates in the inner dialogue, or rather it influences a
part of the self in the debate, for the body as body obviously
lacks an organ for participation. Most interesting is Mr. Lind-
bergh's suggestion that there must be a "third factor" which he
defines as "spirit." This is a significant admission that the
division within the self is more complex than the body-mind
division. This is the more important in view of the fact that
Lindbergh has attributed the power of decision to the "mind"
yet he feels that a third element which he tentatively defines
as "spirit" is over both body and mind. This tri-partite division
of the self falls into a traditional pattern. It is the more sig-
nificant because Lindbergh has obviously made no academic
study of these mysteries. But in common with the scholars he
defines as "spirit" what is really the self itself in its awareness
of its freedom over its functions. Usually the will, one of the
functions of the self, or rather the self in its organization of
its impulses and desires, is thought of as more intimate to
the self than either its mind or body. But Lindbergh assigns
to the self not merely the will which overrules the immediate
impulses but also the capacity to reassure the "anxious mind,"
that is, the anxious self in its immediate consciousness of
danger. He has, in short, given us a very accurate description
of the complexity of the internal dialogue within the self and
of the transcendent unity and freedom of the self in spite of
this dialogue. What he defines as "spirit" might be regarded
as the ultimate freedom of the self over its inner divisions.
This capacity of freedom in Lindbergh's analysis contains ele-
ments of will and resolution but also something which seems
superior to the anxieties of "mind." It is, in short, the self
standing above its functions and capacities and yet proving
its relation to them.

Chapter

THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE SELF
AND OTHERS

JLhe self is engaged In a perpetual dialogue
with other selves in which its dependence upon others becomes
apparent but which also proves Its Independence over all
relationships. These dialogues create dramatic actions of vari-
ous kinds which must be considered presently. The dialogues
may be prompted by casual, or by permanent, relationships
with others. While these dialogues represent a dimension of
selfhood which is usually intended by the definition of the
self as a "social animal," they are not In the category of social
life as usually defined. They move above the level of social
cohesion which may be observed objectively. They are dra-
matic elaborations of these social cohesions.

The self, in its dialogue with others, confronts certain in-
variable conditions of self-fulfillment and self-giving which
may be enumerated as follows:

(A) The self faces the other self as a mystery which can
never be fully penetrated. It can surmise about the internal
life of the other self by way of analogy with its own Internal
dialogue. But these analogies are usually misleading because
the dialogues, while very similar in form, may be very dissimi-
lar in content. The self makes many errors by relying too
much on analogy.

30

THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE SELF AND OTHERS 31

(B) The self sees the other as an instrument for its purposes
and as a completion for its incompleteness. The sexual relation
is the most vivid form of one self seeking completion in an-
other self. The self is completed in the lives and services of
a whole community of persons, but these completions do not
concern us for the moment. We are considering only those
completions which involve dialogic relation between persons
who recognize in each other the mystery of similarity and
uniqueness.

The most obvious solution of the self's dependence upon
others is a relation of mutual dependence which satisfies each
self without making one the mere instrument of the other.

(C) Even an ideal relation of mutual helpfulness can not
satisfy one condition in such a dialogue. The self can not be
truly fulfilled if it is not drawn out of itself into the life of
the other. Mutual love seems to be a satisfactory solution for
this problem, but insofar as mutual love may involve only cool
calculations of reciprocal advantages of the kind Aristotle
describes in his analysis of Phiha, it is always in danger of
degenerating into a relation of mere calculation. If so, it will
ultimately be corrupted by resentments about the lack of re-
ciprocity in the relationship. For even if Aristotle's elaborate
formulae for apportioning "honor" and "profit" in varying
proportions to the "superior" and to the "inferior" partner,
there can never be perfect reciprocity in any relationship be-
cause of the uniqueness of the gifts of the persons in the rela-
tionship.

Even a mutual partnership therefore requires something
more than calculated mutuality to initiate It and to preserve it.
Nature has provided the madness and heedlessness of what is
called "falling in love" for the initiation of the most intimate
and reciprocal of all relationships. One of the problems is
to supply some force more permanent than this original mad-
ness to preserve what has been initiated. This fact gives social
relevance to what would otherwise seem to be a socially ir-
relevant form of love, defined in the New Testament as agape.
This dimension of the dialogue between selves clearly tran-

32 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

scends all canons of prudence, and reveals how the dialogue
Is enriched and sustained by viewpoints which are not directly
derived from the ordinary level of mutuality.

The paradox that "whosoever seeketh to gain his life will
lose it but whoso loseth his life will find it" accurately and
succinctly states the issue encountered In the dialogue between
persons when each person Is too intent to complete his life
in the other in calculated mutuality. If this dimension is not
recognized, the paradox will seem to be a contradiction. Thus
Gardner Murphy worries about this seeming contradiction:
"Psychology can not very well admit/' he declares, "without in
some way adjusting the paradox that human nature is really
capable of effective functioning only under conditions of indi-
vidualistic fulfillment and at the same time claim that it is
the nature of man, so to lose himself in others as to care little
or nothing for the enhancement of the self. . . . Christianity
extols both ideals and leaves us in confusion/' 1

The confusion is rather in Mr. Murphy's mind; and in the
mind of all who would reduce human relations to simple
canons of prudence. It is an obvious fact, which may be "em-
pirically" observed, that the self does not fulfill Itself most
fully when self-realization is its conscious aim. In the same
way happiness and virtue elude conscious striving. In any
event, prudent calculation is not powerful enough to draw the
self from itself as the center of its existence and to find a center
beyond itself. That is why sacrificial love Is such a "scandal"
in any system of prudential ethics, but is so relevant to a full
consideration of the problem of human togetherness.

(D) The self recognizes the other as the limit of its expan-
siveness. It is the "other"; and the otherness includes a final
mystery which even the most imaginative love can not pene-
trate. It is an independent and unique life which, ultimately
considered, can not be fitted into any, even common, purpose
or project. There must therefore be an element of reservation
and reverence for the other in even the most mutual relations.

i Personality, Harper & Brothers, p. 925.

THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE SELF AND OTHERS 33

(E) The uniqueness of the individuals which enter into
any dialogic relation makes each one of these relations highly
unique, however general may be the natural basis of the rela-
tion. Thus each marriage relation takes place upon the com-
mon ground of hetero-sexuality. But each such partnership is
a unique and distinctive drama of mutual adjustment which
exhibits some unrepeatable elements. It becomes a moral and
artistic achievement rather than a scientific one, though science
must master many of the common and general elements at its
foundation, such as common problems of sexual adjustment.

(F) While the self is a unique center of life it is inde-
terminately "open" to other selves. There are no geographic
or temporal limits for the self's dialogue with others. Some of
the significant dialogues are carried on with heroes of the
past or with a deceased parent or absent lover. The dialogue
in such cases may seem to lack the "other/* so necessary for
the dialogue. But memories will furnish the stuff for the dia-
logue which are almost as powerful as contemporary exchanges.

(G) The pattern of these dialogues is conditioned by his-
toric factors. They may change the basis of the pattern but
not annul the highly individual character of the dialogue.
Former ages have, for instance, superimposed the pattern of
male dominance upon the essential mutuality of the marriage
relationship. The modern age has gradually challenged this
pattern with the rising power and freedom of the woman. The
modern marriage relationship is therefore under the necessity
of developing grace within a more rigorously equalitarian
standard between the sexes and providing for two foci, rather
than one, for the family group. In the same way the pattern
expressed in the ancient commandment that "children should
obey their parents'* has been altered by imperceptible degrees
so that, at its worst, the modern pattern defies some basic facts
of nature, which include the superior wisdom and power of
the older generation. At best, they prove that an amiable dis-
respect of parents is more compatible with love than an en-
forced obedience.

Chapter g

THE SELF AND ITS COMMUNITIES

A he self's physical and spiritual need of others
Is naturally satisfied not only in casual and transient but
in permanent relationship. Man is a "social/' or as Aristotle
has it, a "political" animal. Human communities rise from
nature to every type of historical artifact. The simplest, most
primordial and most persistent community is the family,
which is rooted in nature, that is, in hetero-sexuality, pro-
viding for the basic sexual partnership and necessitating a
guardianship by the parents in the human being's long period
of infancy. The long infancy, constantly extended as civiliza-
tion becomes more complex and the skills required for ma-
turity more numerous, is not a fact of pure nature. It is because
man is an historical creature that he comes upon the scene only
partially equipped for life and requiring long tutelage for the
acquisition of his various skills. The family lies naturally at
the basis of the larger community, which is no more In primi-
tive life than an enlarged family, with kinship feeling as the
force of cohesion. Civilization gradually welds these larger
families together into more powerful communities. The guile
of priests and skill of warriors are operative in this enterprise

34

THE SELF AND ITS COMMUNITIES 55

signifying the place of organized physical force and of the ideo-
logical factor in the forces of social cohesion.

The relation of the individual to the community is a com-
plex one which could be defined as consisting of vertical and
horizontal dimensions. In the vertical dimension the individ-
ual is related to the community on two sharply contradictory
forms. He looks up at the community as the fulfillment of his
life and the sustainer of his existence. By its organization his
physical and moral needs are met. Morally the community is,
in the words of Hegel, the individual's "concrete universality."
But there is another direction in which the individual may
look in the vertical dimension, about which Hegel knew little
because he, in common with most rationalists, could not com-
prehend the heights of human selfhood above the dimension
of reason. The individual looks down upon the community
because he is, as it were, higher than it. It is bound to
nature more inexorably than he. It knows nothing of a dimen-
sion of the eternal beyond its own existence. It therefore clings
to its life desperately and may sacrifice every dignity to pre-
serve its mere existence. The highest moral ideal to which it
can aspire is a wise self-interest, which includes others in its
ambition for security. Looking down at the community from
his individual height the individual is embarrassed by the
difference between the moral standards of the community and
his own.

Much of the world's progress has arisen from this embarrass-
ment, for it has tended to lift the standards of the community.
Whenever communities throttle the individual's uneasiness
and insist that the collective sense of the good is absolute, they
sink, as does modern totalitarianism, into a consistent bru-
tality. On the other hand, the idea that the individual's uneasy
conscience about collective morality can be easily transposed
into collective action leads to sentimentality. This has been
particularly apparent in the bourgeois ethos which erroneously
imagined that communities were only provisional entities, to
be dispensed with, as soon as the individual had become fully
emancipated. Looked at from above, the community is the

36 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

frustration of the individual, even as it is his fulfillment when
looked at from below. No historical progress can change the
twofold relation of the individual to the community in the
vertical dimension. The community will always remain both
the fulfillment and the frustration of the individual. Historical
progress may change, or enlarge, the community of primary
loyalty; and make that community more complex with a com-
petition of subordinate loyalties. The individual may achieve
a degree of emancipation from the community by reason of
these competitions, not characteristic of the more monolithic,
usually agrarian, communities. But even the most democratic
communities can not alter the tension between the individual
and the community because it can not alter the difference be-
tween the individual and the collective desires and ambitions
o men.

The social and political history of modernity is charged with
tension between the individual and the community because a
technical civilization has, on the one hand, emancipated the
individual from his organic ties to the community; and has,
on the other hand, given the community a greater cohesion
and intensity than any which prevailed in the agrarian so-
cieties. Superficially the struggle has involved the agrarian
classes, which championed the old organic forms, the bourgeois
or trading and industrial middle class, which sought to exploit
all the new and more flexible and mobile forms of power
which came into their hands, and the industrial workers, who
sought a greater degree of collective planning to protect them
against the hazards and insecurities of a technical civilization.
But the struggle was more than a contest between the classes,
in which each class tried to protect the securities, or expand
the liberties, which were ideologically appropriate to its mode
of life. It was also a struggle in the soul of each individual who
was conscious, on the one hand, of his individual destiny and
worth, and for whom the presuppositions of a Christian inter-
pretation of human dignity seemed to gain a new social and
economic foundation. But, on the other hand, the same indi-
vidual became dependent upon a greater and greater number

THE SELF AND ITS COMMUNITIES 37

of his fellow men for the maintenance of his life and the pres-
ervation of his securities, and was more and more involved
in the collective destiny o his nation or even his civilization.
The emergence of collectivist economies, whether inspired by
romantic or by Marxist ideals, were protests against an indi-
vidualism in which the self became lost in a nameless crowd
after its emancipation from the cohesions of an older organic
society. The tension between the equally forceful and equally
dubious efforts to interpret life either in purely individual or
in purely collectivist terms is derived from the contradictory
consequences of technics upon the community. For they un-
doubtedly enlarge the intensity and extent of social cohesion
on the one hand, while on the other they emancipate the indi-
vidual from the close embrace in which organic communities
held him.

These contradictory estimates have resulted in equally con-
tradictory moral theories. According to the more conventional
theory, conscience is purely a manifestation of the individual's
moral sense and its social character is obscured. But the more
favored theory among psychologists and sociologists is absurdly
collectivist and makes the moral sense merely an expression of
the pressure of the community upon the individual. Actually,
all moral judgements are expressed in tension between two
viewpoints derived from the fact that the individual regards
the community both as fulfillment and as frustration. Some-
times the individual is impressed by the claims of the commu-
nity in comparison with his own private and parochial values.
He may espouse the cause of the community freely in his con-
science. At other times the individual is embarrassed by the
morally mediocre standards of the community. He may be
particularly exercised by this aspect of the community pre-
cisely when the community becomes coercive and tries to sup-
press his qualms of conscience. At such times the individual
may rise to an heroic defiance of the community and thus
refute all simple "social" interpretations of conscience. It is,
of course, significant that the individual infrequently defies a
community of primary loyalty without having his conscience

38 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

informed by another community, religious or political; and
that he may construct a community in his own imagination,
as, for instance, the "community of mankind," though this
community may have no direct contact with him.

The individual experiences his relation to the community
horizontally, rather than vertically, whenever his community is
in conflict with other communities. In moments of competition
or conflict between communities, the individual tends to be-
come identified with his community so that its pride and pres-
tige become his own. Indeed its majesty is frequently a com-
pensation for his own real or seeming Insignificance. This fact
makes the pride of national and racial communities partic-
ularly attractive to individuals who suffer from various forms
of Individual frustration.

We have spoken of "the community" as If It were an exact
entity. Actually there are communities based upon every com-
mon interest, desire or destiny. The European Middle Ages
had a plural communal life, with the small feudal community
furnishing the basic loyalty. It was In turn related to some
larger community which ultimately became the nation. Both
empire and Church tried to be an overarching community
with universal pretensions. Modern Western life has been
formed by the gradual dominance of the national community,
which frequently tried to bring all other communities into
subjection to it. But this growing nationalism is qualified by
the endless elaboration of voluntary communities, rooted In
economic interest, in artistic endeavors, or In religious com-
mitment. The multiplicity of these communities has served to
emancipate the individual, for competition between commu-
nities for the loyalty of the individual served to bring out his
individual decision into sharp relief. The recent growth of
totalitarian regimes rooted in either a fanatic national commu-
nity or in a pseudo-universal class community are rightly re-
garded as protests, though perverse ones, against the disinte-
gration of community under the force of an excessive bourgeois
Individualism and under the disintegrating forces of a techni-
cal civilization, particularly In its urban centers. The national

THE SELF AND ITS COMMUNITIES 39

community has become the community of most inclusive
loyalty because it controls the state's coercive power and be-
cause geographic contiguity, combined with ethnic or linguistic
homogeneity, are sufficient to overcome the potentially divisive
forces of the subordinate communities. The supra-national
integrations have the best chance of success in Western Europe
where unity above the level of the national community has
become the necessity of survival for those nations which bear
the treasures of civilization against the perils of totalitarianism.
These pressures, rather than abstract constitutional schemes,
are the forces of communal cohesion because community is
always an organic, historical entity rather than a purely ra-
tional artifact.

It might be possible indeed to define community as that
association of individuals which has coalesced through forces
of history, operating upon the cohesive forces given in nature
such as geographic contiguity and racial kinship. Human com-
munities have one thing in common with persons. They are
historical entities who have reacted to unique historical events.
Their memory of these events is one of the basic forces of
community. They express their consciousness of their unique-
ness by their devotion to heroes, who represent dramatic and
poetic embodiments of the peculiar "genius" of the nation.
Thus Washington and Lincoln have a special position in the
national "myth" which expresses the self-consciousness of our
nation. The memory of critical events such as the granting of
the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence and
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, are also capable of sustaining
and giving consistency to the "spirit" of the community. Many
communities below the level of the nation, such as racial mi-
norities are more integral as communities if they have the
treasure of common memories, particularly those which are
centered in some heroic or tragic events. The human commu-
nity is thus defined in a dramatic historical pattern, just as is
the individual. This pattern may develop such a degree of
consistency of action that it will be close to natural necessity
or ontological fate. But these historical destinies never produce

40 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

a pattern which could become the basis of confident future
predictions. One may predict that the solidity of the British
community (as contrasted, for instance, with the French na-
tion) will make a civil war less likely in the one nation than
in the other. But beyond that, one can not go. One can not
predict how the British community may react to external or
internal stresses in the future.

Much learned debate has been devoted to the question
whether it is legitimate to ascribe personality to communities.
The debate remains inconclusive because communities lack,
on the one hand, the integrity and the organ of self-transcend-
ence which the individual person boasts, while, on the other
hand, they have, analogous to that of the person, a conscious-
ness of a continuing identity through the flux of historical
events. In the case of the Jewish nation, for instance, the
power of common memories of a dim historic past is strong
enough to preserve the cohesion of the nation though it lacked
until recently a physical and geographic basis for its life. Even
now, the new nation of Israel will not contain the whole of
the Jewish "nation" which continues to live in the diaspora.

Chapter 9

THE SELF AS CREATOR AND CREA-
TURE IN HISTORICAL DRAMA

I

. t is obvious that the self's freedom over natural
process enables it to be a creator of historical events. Both its
memory of past events and its capacity to project goals tran-
scending the necessities of nature enable it to create the new
level of reality which we know as human history. But the self
is not simply a creator of this new dimension, for it is also a
creature of the web of events, in the creation of which it par-
ticipates.

This double relationship naturally causes great perplexities
and gives rise to some rather simple contradictory theories
which emphasize either the one, or the other, role of creator
or creature. The tendency to equate history with nature and
to confuse the "laws of nature" with those of history has given
rise, since the French Enlightenment, to a determinism which
minimizes the creative role of man. The most consistent appli-
cation of this determinism is the economics of laissez faire,
drawn from physiocratic theory, and warning men from inter-
ference with the "natural" processes and "natural" balances
of history.

But the tendency to equate history with nature can also

41

42 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

prompt a contradictory voluntaristic theory according to
which man is called upon to use scientific technics to manage
history, as he has managed nature. Many modern social sci-
entists have been influenced by this voluntarism since Comte;
and have naively insisted on the possibility of transferring the
"scientific method/' learned in the natural sciences to the man-
agement of human affairs. Aldous Huxley has satirized the
dreams of such voluntarists in his Brave New World.

This interesting combination of determinism and volun-
tarism usually presupposes a vaguely defined elite of scientists
who have the omniscience to manage the events in which
ordinary mortals are merely creatures. Modern communism
presents us with a much more dangerous combination of such
determinism and voluntarism. It has a self-appointed elite, the
Communist Party, who, by reason of being the only ones who
are privy to the logic, which supposedly determines historical
events, are able to intervene at the crucial moments to further
the logic and finally to take the heroic step which will insure
not only the victory of the "proletariat," but change the whole
human situation by making man the unambiguous master of
historical destiny rather than merely both creature and creator.

It remained for some modern cultural anthropologist to cor-
rect the absurdities of these combinations of voluntarism and
determinism which underestimated the freedom of the man
who is to be managed, and the finiteness of the man who is to
do the managing, by projecting an even more absurdly con-
sistent determinism, according to which all men are the pris-
oners of their respective cultures with no opportunity to ex-
hibit characteristically universal human traits.

The freedom of man beyond the limits of the historical sit-
uation in which his art and life is formed does not necessarily
reveal itself in those elements of his art which rise to the
height of universally valid insights. It may manifest itself in
highly individual insights, transcending the conventions of his
society. As an instance: the culture of France, in the period
of the Empire, nurtured three great novelists, Balzac, Flau-
bert and George Sand. Their novels were characterized by a

THE SELF AS CREATOR AND CREATURE 43

common unconventional attitude toward sexual relations,
characteristic of that period. But one of them, George Sand,
also expressed a highly individual attitude within the general
standards of the period. Her novels left the reader uncertain
whether she intended to glorify wantonness or wished to ex-
pound the thesis that sexual relations, whether inside or out-
side of marriage, were intolerable without love. This attitude
expressed neither the "convention of her period nor some uni-
versally valid standard.

The freedom of men above their status as creatures of the
historical drama does not necessarily express itself in conscious
efforts to determine historical destiny. That ambition may be
reserved for a few great statesmen; and the illusion of such
creativity is held only by a few dreamers. Actually the crea-
tivity which may, or may not, affect historical destiny is open
to every man even in the humblest walks of life when he comes
to terms with his unique problems partly in terms which his
culture supplies, and partly according to his unique gifts and
inclinations. Whether his unique response "makes" history or
not is largely out of his hands, for only the future can deter-
mine whether his unique response is to be the basis of a new
historical pattern or is to be stored in the storehouse of history
as merely another proof of the endless variety of human re-
sponses.

We might speculate endlessly upon such mysteries as the
source of the unique moral courage which a man like General
Rommel exhibited in his final defiance of Hitler and how it
was related to his previous Nazi creed and could be compared
with the courage of other generals who had the advantage of
non-Nazi background but were not able to show a like courage.
We will also have to wait upon history to find whether
Churchill's obvious relish in the heroism of this gallant foe
restored some of the dignity of gallantry into modern national
combats or was merely the last flicker of light from a more
romantic age in an age which has no use for such romantic
candles in its neon-lighted modernity.

Chapter JQ

THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF
HISTORY

dialogues, in which the self is involved, are
transmuted into dramas whenever they precipitate action.
These actions are formed into dramatic patterns which con-
stitute a web of destiny for the individual, determining sub-
sequent actions and dialogues. These dramatic patterns may
extend to various communities, family, local or national. The
dramatic patterns are historic realities in which freedom and
necessity are variously compounded. The most indubitable
constancies are those which are rooted in natural necessities,
as, for instance, the facts of geography and climate in man's
collective life and those of sex and age in man's individual life.
But there are constancies of history which are almost as pre-
dictable as those founded in nature. Yet they are clearly his-
torical, as, for instance, the constancies derived from the "char-
acter" of a culture.

The dramatic patterns contain causal sequences which may
be analyzed with some degree of accuracy. It is possible to
determine not only that a certain chain of events actually hap-
pened but also, to an extent, why they happened. But every
answer to the question, why the events happened, must be

44

THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY 45

speculative, since historical causation is very complex, each,
event standing in various chains of causation. Therefore one
could not make a precise estimate of the "real" cause of an
event, or even of its dominant cause. Historical analyses do not
lend themselves to precise analogies with similar or contrasting
patterns, nor can they become the basis of predictions of future
events. Therefore the analyses of historical patterns must lack
the scientific precision which characterize the conclusions of
the natural sciences. In short, they must fail in the test of pre-
dictability which is the hallmark of any exact science.

Historical patterns are in a category of reality which can
not be identified with the structures of nature. They are to be
sharply distinguished from natural structures because they
represent a compound of freedom and necessity.

History is the more complex because one pattern is super-
imposed upon another: the dramatic pattern of a national his-
tory, for instance, upon the dramatic pattern of a whole
culture. Who can answer the question definitively, whether
America is involved in the history of a culture which may
be defined as "Western"; or whether the peculiar conditions
of American history, our virgin soil, our continental economy,
our heterogeneous population and our youthful energies sep-
arate our destiny from that of European culture?

It is because historical causation is endlessly complex, and
historical dramas overlap one another in bewildering con-
fusion, that history is not subject to the generalizations of
either the scientists or the philosophers, who insist on trying
to comprehend its multifarious themes in terms of either nat-
ural or ontological necessity. There are, of course, valid social
or historical sciences. They are most legitimate when the scien-
tists know themselves to be historians, rather than natural sci-
entists; and therefore recognize that their generalizations are
hazardous and speculative. The real historians have an instinct
for the peculiar quality of history and know the hazards of
predictions of the future. Economics, which began under
physiocratic illusions, has, in these latter years, become more
and more conscious of the endless historical contingencies

46 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

which it must take into account in its predictions. Economists
have therefore become increasingly modest, in contrast to some
other social sciences, burdened with more physiocratic illusions
about so-called "laws of nature."

Historical facts can be dealt with most "scientifically" when
the field of inquiry is reduced to some manageable set
of uniformities or recurrences in the behavior of individuals,
subject to the same set of natural or historical circumstances
to the attitudes of adolescents or convalescents, for instance,
or the behavior of industrial or agricultural labor, or to the
conditions of urban life or to the effect of boarding-house ex-
istence upon family life. In such, and similar cases, statistical
evidence may support generalizations; and uniformities of be-
havior may be distinguished from the historically variable fac-
tors. Sometimes predictions are inaccurate, even in these mod-
est undertakings; in some cases because the unpredictable
freedom of man is not taken into account, but more frequently
because not enough attention has been given to variable con-
ditioning circumstances. Efforts to predict elections in previous
decades failed miserably because sample opinions were taken
from people listed in telephone directories; and their ideolog-
ical bias did not accurately typify the whole political spectrum.
Now the samplings are undertaken more scientifically, that is,
with due regard for the various groups of a community and
their characteristic biases, based on economic and other inter-
ests. But no science can determine whether a Polish worker of
Hamtramck, Michigan, will vote according to the prevailing
opinion in the CIO, or according to his convictions about the
adequacy of an administration policy in clearing up the war-
time mystery of the murders in the Katyn forests in Poland.
If wider generalizations are attempted, as, for instance, cov-
ering groups in the same economic class but under differing
historical environment, they become more hazardous. What
nonsense history made of the Marxist slogan: "Workers of the
World Unite/' It mistakenly assumed the equal disinheritance
of industrial laborers in every nation, and incidentally the pri-
macy of their economic interest. There are, no doubt, legiti-

THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY 47

mate generalizations about the character of bourgeois commu-
nities as contrasted with agrarian ones. But will any such gen-
eralizations do justice to the variables in the middle-class life
of France and Britain, of Australia and America?

In any event, no scientific investigations of past behavior
can become the basis o predictions of future behavior. Even
if an historian is able to establish causal sequences after the
event, he can not make any generalizations about the past the
basis of predictions of future actions and events. He can not
do so, not only because he has insufficient knowledge of the
complex causes of the past; but because he can not predict
which one of the many tendencies and forces which determine
actions, may have a dominant place in the life of individuals
and nations. Only one historian, Jacob Burckhardt, was able
to foretell the rise of twentieth-century tyrannies in the nine-
teenth century. And no one, as late as the beginning of this
century, predicted the nightmare which eventuated from the
Marxist dreams of heaven on earth. Marx would certainly have
been surprised by contemporary realities. These surprising his-
torical events are a refutation of all purely scientific or meta-
physical efforts to interpret the drama of history and to reduce
its seeming confusion to some kind of simple meaning.

If the analysis of uniformities and recurrences of behavior
under like conditions may be defined as the scientific com-
ponent of historiography, the biographic pinnacles of history
are the most vivid reminders of its dramatic character which
defies scientific analysis. The career of an eminent contempo-
rary statesman, Sir Winston Churchill, will illustrate how
human character rises by gradual stages from the necessities
of nature, through historic destinies until it reaches the height
of a highly individual and unique response to the unique
events of its history. Sir Winston Churchill owes some of his
"character" to the fact that he was born an Englishman in the
Victorian period, and others to the fact that he was born in
the aristocracy of that era. His characteristic differences from
Mr. Chamberlain are partly due to his aristocratic background,
for instance. Some of the influences upon his life are due to

48 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

his descent from the Duke of Marlborough and some to the
fact that he did not stand in the direct line of descent. The
Dukes of Marlborough were inconspicuous country gentlemen.
Mr. Churchill's ambition was undoubtedly fired by his lack
of an assured place in the scheme of things as a son of a second
son. Was the example of his father the determining factor?
Or perhaps the neglect by his engrossed father and mother?
It would have ruined a less robust lad, but it did not prompt
resentment in him toward either his father or mother. It
merely encouraged him to seek fame in order to be worthy of
a father who ignored him, but whom he adored. One could
go on to multiply the multifarious chain of causes which
played upon his life. Any conclusions about the relative im-
portance of any set of factors would be highly speculative. Nor
would any analysis of his antecedents help to explain how a
man, so obviously ambitious, did not involve himself in the
self-defeat in which ambition usually becomes involved. "How
vain are the calculations of self-interest," said Mr. Churchill,
in surveying the pathetic life of the French Admiral Darlan.
Why was this observation not true of Mr. Churchill? And what
forces in his history caused the extraordinary degree of mag-
nanimity in so resourceful a fighter? None of these questions
about Mr. Churchill or any other character can be answered
"scientifically/' in the sense that one can establish a rationally
compelling correlation of causes which lead to a given result.
Biography is significantly an art. It is related to the art of por-
traiture. This latter art has not been superseded by the more
exact science of photography. The reason is that portraiture
spurns the science of reproducing the exact facial lineaments
of a given moment for the art of seeing the quite essential
character above and behind momentary expressions of mood.
History is more of a science than biography because it can
correlate and compare more facts and establish trends under
seemingly unique events. But historiography can never be an
exact science. The real historians know this and leave it to
some modern social scientists to cherish this illusion.

It is interesting to note that Aristotle, who did not have

THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY 49

modern science's knowledge of the evolution of historic as
well as natural forms, and lived under the illusion that the
structures of both nature and history were fixed, made a sharp
distinction between science which would analyze the "con-
stants/* and "phronesis" (practical wisdom) which must
deal with contingent elements in life and history. The fact is
that the sharpest distinction must be made between processes
in which things "come to be" and "pass away" within a fixed
structure of reality and the whole realm of human history,
culminating in biography. In this realm there is a subordinate
dimension in which events follow in a "necessary manner" as,
for instance, the growth of a child through adolescence to
maturity.

The radical freedom of the self and the consequent dramatic
realities of history are naturally embarrassing to any scientific
effort, either to understand or to master history. There is a
consequent tendency in the psychological and social sciences
to suppress these inconvenient facts about man, and to em-
phasize the various facts which "determine" his actions and
destinies. History is indeed full of these determining condi-
tions of geography and climate, of social and economic con-
ditions, of environment and heredity. They lend plausability
to the various determinisms, sociological and psychological,
which negate some of the obvious "facts" about man and his
history in order to comprehend them "scientifically," which
sometimes ironically connotes "empirically."

The impulse to falsify the facts in order to bring them into
a comprehensible pattern assails the scientists who try to man-
age detailed facts and small patterns. Another analogous temp-
tation assails the philosophers and ontologists who try to
make sense out of the larger patterns of history and to com-
prehend the whole drama of history as meaningful. Naturally
the mind is baffled by the seeming confusion of the historical
drama, devoid of the neat endings, whether tragic or happy,
which art gives to the various dramas of history in order to
endow them with comprehensible conclusions.

It is significant that working historians have an instinctive

50 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

reaction to the ambitions of the philosophers and to their pre-
tension that they have discovered a larger ontological pattern
behind, within and above the phantasmagoria of history. "Men
wiser and more learned than I," writes the great historian
H. A. L. Fisher in the preface to his History of Europe, "have
discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pat-
tern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I see only one
emergency following upon another, as wave follows on wave;
only one great fact, with respect to which, since it is unique,
there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the his-
torian: that he should recognize in the development of human
destinies the play of the contingent and unforeseen."

Every philosophical effort to understand history is based on
the assumption that in some depth of reality a pattern may
be found In which that which seems "contingent and unfore-
seen" takes its place as a "necessary" development, as a servant
of the hidden logic which underlies and informs all things.

In the history of Western civilization the efforts to compre-
hend history ontologically have been many; but they all fall
into two primary categories: (A) the classical idea of the his-
torical cycle and (B) the modern idea of historical develop-
ment. This modern idea which has been elaborated since the
Renaissance takes such various forms as the Hegelian dialec-
tical view of historical development and the supposedly un-
metaphysical and purely scientific idea of development in the
thought of the social Darwinists. All these ideas of "progress"
express the historical optimism of modern man. In various
metaphysical and scientific garbs they present themselves as
the effective religion of modern man. He endows his own life
with meaning because he can set it into the frame of a simply
meaningful history.

The two ideas of the cycle and of development actually
define two basic facts of historical occurrences. The cycle de-
fines the birth, life and death of the organisms which partici-
pate in the historical stream. Since nations, cultures and civili-
zations are not organisms, in the exact sense of the word, and
have no definitely allotted time span of biological organisms,

THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY 51

the classical analogy between biological and historical cycles
was therefore partly erroneous. The error did not become ap-
parent until the Aristotelian concept of a fixed historical struc-
ture was challenged by the idea of historical development.
Nevertheless, it contains a modicum of truth. For historical
cultures, civilizations and communities are mortal, though
their decay and death is never a fate ordained by their nature,
but is always partly the result of historic mistakes and miscal-
culations.

The modern progressive view is just as true and just as false
as the cyclical view. It is just as true because it corresponds to
one indubitable fact about history. That fact is that there has
been a steady growth of man's control of the natural forces
which furnish the basis of history. This development has
proceeded throughout the rise and fall of particular civiliza-
tions. It has culminated in the development of technics, which
have altered the possibilities of cohesion in the community as
well as changing the physical basis of historical existence.
Growing technics include means of communication which
have made larger units of cohesion possible; and the develop-
ment in weapons of warfare which have culminated in the fear-
fully lethal atomic weapons of our day. This growth in tech-
nics has been so phenomenal that it has prompted the modern
illusion of "progress." But it becomes daily more apparent that
man's technical mastery over nature has not seriously altered
either his spiritual or intellectual endowments nor changed his
essential stature as both creator and creature in history. Tech-
nical development has therefore not changed history from its
essence as a drama to a course of predictable development.

The two patterns of the cycle and the forward movement
are therefore not so much dramatic patterns as they are the
two dimensions of the stage upon which the drama is played.
They have only negative significance for the meaning of his-
tory. Confusion results when positive meaning is ascribed to
these two dimensions of the stage of the drama. Spengier's and
Toynbee's efforts to restore the cycle as a bearer of positive
meaning prove both the possibilities and the limits of fitting

52 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

the drama of history into the cyclical mold. The endless variety
of dramatic themes which are superimposed upon the his-
torical cycles and the fact that their life, growth and death
do not follow the necessities of the natural cycle but are due
to human ingenuity and human failure, make the cycle impos-
sible as a bearer of positive meaning. It may be inevitable
that every culture or civilization should die. But it is possible
that this death should prove to be the transmutation into an-
other kind of life. This is at least one reason why historical
cycles are not analogous to natural cycles, and why they can
be bearers of a positive interpretation of the historical drama.
In the same manner historical development is not really
analogous to natural growth. The basic fact of historical devel-
opment is probably caused by man's increasing mastery of
nature, and not upon any law of the "survival of the fittest"
nor upon some obscure historical dialectic such as Hegel dis-
cerns. Certainly the ideas of progress, whether pretending to
be "scientific" or "philosophical," tend to obscure the inter-
play between freedom and necessity which gives the human
drama such a bewildering complexity. Yet there is historical
development. Problems do recur in ever widening dimensions,
as, for instance, the problem of community, which has reached
global proportions in our day. But no "progress" can assure
the solution of these ever wider and more complex problems.
The forward movement can give history no more positive
meaning than the cycle. Both describe, not patterns, but con-
ditions for the historical drama.

Chapter \ \

THE PROBLEM OF HISTORICAL
KNOWLEDGE

henever we consider the historical drama, we
confront not only the fact that it is a realm of such contingency
that it is difficult to find the structures and patterns which
might be regarded as "really real/' but also the fact that the
observers of this drama are invariably themselves involved in
the historical flux which they are trying to survey. Distance
from controversial issues and efforts at "scientific objectivity"
may give some historical observers a relative detachment from
the issues which they try to interpret. But nothing can give
any observer such detachment from the historical scene as
would endow his views with the same kind of unchallenged
and unchallengeable validity, which the conclusions of the
natural scientists well may claim.

Thus the problem of the reliability of any knowledge about
history is so serious that one may well be surprised that the
logical positivists, who are sceptical about any propositions
which do not contain either logical or mathematical axioms
or "scientifically verifiable" conclusions, have not given more
attention to the problem of the dubious character of all propo-
sitions about historical sequences of events. It is in fact an

55

54 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

insoluble problem. Yet In the absence of omniscience we do
fairly well in allowing various historians, reporting from their
various temporal and ideological loci, to report and interpret
the events of history. Extravagant biases are, of course, refuted;
and it is possible to distinguish a true historian from an ob-
vious propagandist, though it is not possible to draw a simple
line between genuine history or propaganda. But it is not
possible to get a definitive interpretation of such events as the
French Revolution or the American Civil War, for instance,
which would refute all conflicting interpretations.

We recently had a vivid reminder of the relativity of his-
torical knowledge, when two former ambassadors to Spain,
both historians, Claude Bowers and Carleton Hayes, reported
on the civil war in Spain, Mr. Bowers' Mission to Spain and
Mr. Hayes* Wartime Mission in Spam. The one was favorable
and the other unfavorable to the Spanish Republican cause.
Mr. Bowers regarded the civil war in Spain as a prelude to the
World War, and Mr. Hayes thought of it as a prelude to our
present cold war with Russia. Both are honest historians and
neither falsified the facts; but they chose very different facts
and subjected all relevant facts to contrasting interpretations.
Mr. Hayes is a liberal Catholic while Mr. Bowers stands in the
Jeffersonian tradition.

Many histories of the French Revolution have been written
from the diverse viewpoints of Jacobin and communist dog-
mas, from Bonapartist and Bourbon perspectives. But histori-
cal distance has not resolved the difference between them or
given any one viewpoint a clear victory over the others. Some-
times the historical victory of a cause serves to give the view-
point of the victorious cause a clear priority over the viewpoint
of the vanquished. Accounts of our Civil War now remain
comparatively unchallenged even though they can not satisfy
the South. Even Lincoln is reluctantly accepted by the defeated
South as a national symbol, provided Robert E. Lee can be
bracketed with him as an equal hero. The Cavalier victory
over the Roundheads in the restoration has made the historical
interpretation of Cromwell's protectorate a fairly indisputable

THE PROBLEM OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE 55

matter. Significantly, however, Americans have shown a rather
more lively interest in the democratic sects of Cromwell's army
than the British historians have evinced. Though defeated,
their ideas furnished seminal influences for Anglo-Saxon
democracy which are cherished on both sides of the Atlantic.
Perhaps one reason why the historical interpretation of the
French Revolution remains so inconclusive is that the Revolu-
tion itself has not been resolved in French political life. Thus
history and the interpretation of history are mutually de-
pendent.

An analysis of some larger patterns of history, such as the
disintegration of the "Medieval synthesis" in the sixteenth
century, will prove the inevitable "ideological" framework of
any historical inquiry and the impossibility of refuting any of
the conflicting interpretations conclusively.

The disintegration of the medieval culture resulted in the
emergence of two religio-cultural forces, generally described
as the "Reformation" and the "Renaissance." Both Renais-
sance and Reformation were rebellious against a culture and
civilization, informed by the Catholic faith, which reached its
flower in the thirteenth century and is still regarded as the
"golden age" by Catholic historians. From the viewpoint of
the children of either the Reformation or the Renaissance, the
disintegration of this monolithic culture was inevitable. Its
decay was apparent from the fourteenth century, that is, before
overt rebellion shook its authority. The disintegration is re-
garded as inevitable because its static social and economic
disciplines were not able to contain the new vitalities of a
growing commercial civilization. Furthermore its Papal uni-
versalisxn was not able to come to terms with the power of
emerging nationalism; and its clerical authoritarianism was
not able to do justice to the cultural vitalities of the movement
defined as the Renaissance. The children of both Renaissance
and Reformation would probably agree in these estimates; but
the children of the Reformation would add further indict-
ments. They would place primary emphasis in the indictment
of the medieval Church, that it had sought to derive political

56 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

power from Its prestige of sanctity; that it had substituted for
the Biblical faith an amalgam of Biblical and classical ideas
which guaranteed the individual salvation if he diligently
climbed the ladder of merit and rigorously disciplined the
"passions of the body/' particularly sexual passions; that it
presumed to mediate between man and God and to control the
keys to Heaven; that it therefore obscured the real Biblical
message of salvation, which set the individual under the judge-
ment of God, and promised him forgiveness and renewal of
life if he accepted this judgement with contrition and was
made aware of his self -worship.

The primary concern of the Reformation was a religious
one. Therefore Luther's defiance of ecclesiastical and political
authority; and his words "Here I stand; I can do no other,
so help me God/' is regarded by the Reformation as incidental
to the primary religious issue, while it is appreciated by the
Renaissance as the one fact which makes the Reformation
relevant to the struggle for liberty. The Reformation and the
Renaissance also have different motives for objecting to Papal
authority. The Reformation regards the clerical authoritarian-
ism as an affront to the majesty of God, while the Renaissance
regards it as a threat to the liberty of the mind.

The interpretations of the disintegration of the synthesis
are thus partly contrasting and partly similar. There can be no
definitive interpretation of what happened which could refute
either one or both of these interpretations because the inter-
pretations are informed by specific frames of meaning which
must be shared before the conclusions emerging from the
frame of meaning, prove acceptable. No amount of "empirical
observation" or "scientific objectivity" can resolve such con-
flicts in the interpretation of historical events because there
are few facts which refute interpretations which deal with the
motives of the actors, the importance of specific causes of the
events and the dominant tendencies of history in which these
events are believed to be correlated. In short, the frames of
meaning determine the interpretation of facts.

Insofar as Catholicism, though dethroned as the arbiter of

THE PROBLEM OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE 57

culture and civilization, remains nevertheless a vital religious
force, it is not possible to prove to its adherents that the
Reformation and Renaissance were both inevitable and justi-
fied rebellions against both the content and the authority o
the Catholic faith. Some intelligent Catholic historians will
persist in the convictions that these rebellions must be held
responsible for modern nationalism and for every other an-
archic force in life. In short, there can be no definitive refuta-
tions of any interpretation of historical events, though the
forces of history may conspire to refute some extravagantly
"biased" interpretations, or those which are too contradictory
to facts so obvious that they do not depend upon interpreta-
tions for validation.

This persistence of "ideological" elements in historical inter-
pretation has exercised the epistemologists among the phi-
losophers as much as the peculiar character of historical pat-
terns has baffled the metaphysicians. One philosopher, obvi-
ously under the influence of the natural sciences, has offered
a simple solution for the problem of the relativity of historical
knowledge. He would eliminate "evaluations" in order to get
rid of "evaluational distortions." Since all the structures of
meaning which furnish the principle of coherence for his-
toriography are contained in these "evaluations," this solution
is a rather rigorous one which would leave us with little else
but the bare dates of critical events. 1 Historical events are
established in terms of coherence by precisely the "evaluations"
which are so embarrassing philosophically. They point to the
impossibility of reducing historical drama to natural co-
herences.

At the opposite pole of historical epistemology is the "ideal-
istic" interpretation, initiated by Dilthey and expressed most
consistently in the thought of the late R. G. Collingwood, one
of the most eminent philosophers of our time. He proves that
a philosopher has almost as great difficulty as a pure scientist
in interpreting the dramatic essence of history. He is clear that

i Maurice Mandelbaum: The Problem of Historical Knowledge.

58 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

history must be sharply distinguished from nature, for "the
processes of nature can be described as a sequence of mere
events but the processes of history can not. They are . . .
processes of actions which have an inner side, consisting of
processes of thought. What the historian is looking for is these
processes of thought. All history is the history of thought." 2
The rethinking of the "thought" which inspired historical
action, is according to Collingwood, "not a passive surrender
to the spell of another's mind. It is the labor of active, and
therefore critical thinking. The historian not only reenacts
past thought but he reenacts it in the context of his own
knowledge, and therefore in reenacting it criticizes it." 3

Among the many difficulties of this rather implausible ra-
tionalizing of history, two deserve special consideration. (1)
The unconscious, or only partly conscious, motives of the great
actors of history, their resentments, ambitions and jealousies,
can hardly be dignified as "thoughts"; and they are in any
event more inscrutable than Collingwood supposes. Even if
they were entirely overt, the question would still arise whether
they could give us the real clue to the meaning of the sequences
of events. Collingwood does riot consider or refute the thesis
of Tolstoi's great novel War and Peace, which was that his-
torical patterns develop in ironic disregard of the purposes
and ambitions of the actors of the drama.

We can not understand the pathetic period in which Hitler
dominated Germany by reconstructing his thoughts or those
of all of his lieutenants. Only a philosopher could have attrib-
uted such a motive to the historian. The historian would know
that Hitler was probably not too conscious of the strange mix-
ture of ambition and resentment which animated him. Col-
lingwood made the mistake of defining as "thought" what is
really the dramatic freedom which distinguishes history.

(2) Historical events are the product of a concatenation of
social and historical forces, and therefore the thoughts even

2 R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History, p 215, Oxford University
Press.
s Ibid.

THE PROBLEM OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE 59

of the most eminent actors in the historical drama are unim-
portant in comparison with the interplay of these forces. If
we revert once more to the tragedy of Hitler's Germany, we
would understand it more completely, not merely by reading
Hitler's Mem Kampf, but by tracing the strange confluence of
historic forces and tendencies which permitted Hitler to dom-
inate a nation momentarily and to involve it in disaster. The
historian would have to explain why in Germany the private
virtues of diligence and obedience could be so easily harnessed
to collective evil; why the German people have preserved such
extraordinary docility toward the pretensions of political
power; why the German aristocracy was chiefly preoccupied
with military tasks, why it became the unwilling tool of the
mad Corporal and was unable or unwilling to extricate itself
from his power; why the German middle classes, which in
other countries became the bearers of democracy, developed
an industrial efficiency surpassing that of any other nation
while remaining politically incompetent and impotent. The
historian would also find it necessary to inquire into the wit-
ting and unwitting connivance of other "democratic" nations
in the rise of Hitler: why France, which is almost as incom-
petent on the political scene as Germany, should develop static
forms of corruption which provided the foil lor Germany's
dynamic corruption; and why Britain, politically so much
wiser than either France or Germany, should have thought it
necessary to remain "uncommitted" in their quarrels and
should thus have unwittingly encouraged Germany in her two
world wars. These questions are but a few of those which his-
torians have and will ask. In answering them and unraveling
the tangled skein of the historical drama, they will make gen-
eralizations which will strike the reader as either competent
or incompetent, as either hopelessly "prejudiced" or as com-
paratively "objective/' But not one of their generalizations
will be able to pass any of the tests which Descartes elaborated
in his Discourse on Method. The field of causation in historical
events is so multiple, and the motives of men so complex and
obscure, and the dramatic patterns so multifarious that the

60 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

artist-historian must certainly rely more on phronesis than
upon nous to venture any generalization. This fact is so obvi-
ous that one would have thought that all the genuine his-
torians would have, while admitting scientific and philosoph-
ical elements in their labors, long since organized a common
defense against the philosophers and scientists who endanger
the procedures of historiography by their scientific and "onto-
logical" pretensions.

Both the historians and the average reader have an under-
standing for the dramatic essence of historical "facts," and dis-
count as far as possible the ideological bias of the historian or
correct the bias by other viewpoints, while the scientists and
philosophers look in vain for some criterion of absolute truth
in history. No such criterion can be found, because all ob-
servers are directly or remotely "interested" and the stuff of
history is too complex to make it possible to convict any par-
ticular correlation of events or interpretation of historical
sequences of "bias." Even when events are so far removed from
contemporary issues that an "objective" view of them seems
possible, some, even remote, analogical possibility may sud-
denly make a former historical dispute relevant to an imme-
diate issue. The question why the Roman Empire declined
ceases to be a remote historical issue as soon as someone tries
to prove an analogy between the policies of Rome and those
of the "New Deal/* for instance.

Chapter J2

THE SELF AND ITS SEARCH FOR
ULTIMATE MEANING

I,

.n analyzing the various dimensions of human
selfhood, we have thus far concerned ourselves with the pre-
suppositions of the inquiry only insofar as we have called at-
tention to the fact that the tendency to identify the self with
its mind is as erroneous as it is persistent. The error obscures
the freedom of the self over its rational faculties.

If we now proceed to inquire more rigorously into the di-
mension and character of that freedom, it will become appar-
ent that the religious inclination of men is derived from that
freedom. The freedom makes it impossible for them to con-
sider systems of rational intelligibility, whether conceived in
idealistic or naturalistic terms, as a solution for the problem
of the meaning of their life. They discern a mystery and mean-
ing above and beyond their rational faculties in themselves;
and they also surmise that the chain of causes, whether con-
ceived in terms of efficient or final cause, that is, whether in
terms of idealistic or naturalistic metaphysics, points beyond
itself to a mystery of creativity. This is true because any previ-
ous event is an intelligible, but not a sufficient, cause for the
succeeding event. It was Hume's scepticism about causes which

61

<52 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

first breached the confidence in the intelligibility o the world
and prompted Kant to elaborate his critical idealism, in which
for the first time the confidence in reason was separated from
confidence in a rational ontological order. The result was his
conception of a mysterious Ding an sich, of a noumenal reality
which indicated the mystery beyond the rationally intelligible
phenomenal world of finite entities and relationships.

These scruples in modern philosophy have tended to create
mystic overtones in any rational system, well-defined in Ber-
trand Russell's Mysticism and Logic. They are indications of
the inevitable emergence of explicit religion even in cultures
which have ostensibly banished mystery from a world believed
to be completely subject to a rational order including both the
knower and the known.

It must be noted however that the world views which assume
the rational intelligibility of the world, without mystery, are
not less "religious" because they disavow explicit religious
faith. Confidence in a rational order is, as the great rationalist
Bradley admits, also a faith. The self, even of a philosopher,
is religious to the degree that the self must commit itself to
a system of meaning, even if it has the view that the system is
so self-explanatory and that it takes the self as mind so com-
pletely into its system of self-consistent truth that nothing
more than the elimination of ignorance seems required to
prompt the self to its acceptance.

But it is significant that these implicit religions never suffice
in the long run, even when, as in the French Enlightenment
or in modern communism, they rise to emotional heights of
devotion which inadvertently betray a committed self rather
than a dispassionate niind. The more explicit religions are,
however, the more overt reactions to the fact that the self senses
a mystery in itself and a mystery in the world beyond the flux
of observable causes. It therefore tries to overcome the threat
to the meaning of its life by finding that the one mystery, the
ultimate or divine mystery, is a key to the understanding of
the mystery of the self's transcendent freedom.

The task of penetrating the ultimate mystery prompts many

THE SELF'S SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE MEANING 63

responses, but they could ail be placed into three general
categories: (A) The first category embraces all religious re-
sponses in which the self seeks to break through a universal
rational system in order to assert its significance ultimately.
It may seek to do this individually, as in modern romantic and
existentialist thought; or it may be so conscious of its finite-
ness as an individual that it finds no opportunity to assert
the ultimate significance of itself in history except by asserting
the significance of the collective self. This category, in short,
embraces all the idolatrous religions of ancient history, includ-
ing both primitive polytheism and the imperial religions of
Egypt and Babylon, and (in more artificial terms) of Rome.
Until a recent day this idolatry, in which the individual self
finds the ultimate source of its meaning in the history of the
collective self so much more imposing though also so much
closer to the flux of nature, was thought to be a phase of history
which was overcome by the rise of the rigorously monotheistic
religions and monistic philosophies. But the recrudescence of
religious nationalism and the pseudo-universalistic Messianism
of communism have instructed us that this idolatry, this wor-
ship of the collective self as if it were ultimate and not finite,
is not merely due to the limits of a primitive imagination. It
corresponds to a perennial desire in the human heart to eat
one's cake and have it, too; to subordinate the finite self to
something greater than it but not so great that the self may
not participate in the exaltation of the finite value. Naturally
this idolatrous religion must have baneful effects, not only
because it complicates the problem of group relations by exag-
gerating the claims of contingent historical forces in competi-
tion with each other, but because the unconditioned commit-
ment of the self to the collective self must rob it of its free-
dom; for the collective self is, though more imposing and
more long-lived than the individual self, also so much more
bound to nature and its necessities, so defective in organs of
self-transcendence and therefore so much farther removed from
the ultimate source of meaning, that the self debases itself by
this uncritical devotion.

64 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

(B) The second alternative of explicit religious response
has been defined by Aldous Huxley as "The Perennial Philos-
ophy." He is right in asserting that it is a fairly universal re-
sponse, but wrong in concluding that this universality guar-
antees its validity. This response, generally defined as "mys-
ticism," stands at the opposite pole of idolatry. It is in fact
an heroic effort to transcend all finite values and systems of
meaning, including the self as particular existence, and to
arrive at universality and "unconditioned" being. The per-
sistence of this mystic tendency in the religions of the world
is a telling proof of the ability of the self, in the ultimate
reaches of its freedom and self-awareness, to discern some affin-
ity between the mystery within itself and the mystery behind
the observable phenomena and to find the key to universality
in the joining of these two mysteries. This "perennial philos-
ophy" embraces not only the systems, stemming from the
thought of Plotinus, in the Western world but practically all
religions of the Orient. It is expressed in the Brahman over-
tones of Hindu polytheism; in the Sufist tradition of Moham-
medanism; in the Taoist tradition of Chinese culture and,
most classically, in Buddhism. Here the search for undifferen-
tiated being reaches the height of asserting a type of being as
the goal of existence about which one can not be certain
whether it is the fullness or the absence of being. It is certainly
being bereft of all relationships and meanings.

(C) The third alternative, an explicitly religious answer to
the self's search for the ultimate, embraces the two Biblical
faiths of Judaism and Christianity. These faiths interpret the
self's experience with the ultimate in the final reaches of its
self-awareness as a dialogue with God. The idea of a dialogue
between the self and God assumes the personality of God, an
assumption which both rationalists and mystics find untenable,
but to which Biblical faith clings stubbornly. Selfhood or per-
sonality is supposedly not attributable to God because the idea
of personality is loaded with connotations of finiteness and
therefore casts a suspicion of "anthropomorphism" upon Bib-
lical faith. But it is significant that both mystics and rational-

THE SELF'S SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE MEANING 65

Ists have as much difficulty in ascribing personality to man as
to God. This fact suggests that it is not the connotations of
finiteness which create the difficulty but rather the fact that
personality is characterized by both a basic structure and a
freedom beyond structure. The rationalists can comprehend
the structure within a system of rational cohesion; and the
mystics are able to interpret the freedom as part of a system
of undifferentiated potentiality. But neither is able to com-
prehend the total fact of personality within its system.

The dialogue between the self and God results in the con-
viction of the self, but not for reason of its finiteness. It is
convicted rather of its pretension or "sin"; of claiming too
much for its finiteness, and for the virtue and wisdom, which
it achieves in its finiteness. The idea of such an encounter
therefore permits the Biblical faiths both to affirm the life of
the self in history and to challenge its achievements in any
particular instance. "Enter not into judgement with thy serv-
ant, for in thy sight is no man living justified," declares the
Psalmist. Kierkegaard sums up this theme of Biblical religions
with the affirmation that "Before God all men are in the
wrong." The fact that the self is judged for every inclination
which affronts God's "majesty" by pride or lust for power is
the religious dimension of sin. The prophets are however
equally conscious of the social dimension which is the inclina-
tion of the self to take advantage of its fellow men. This "in-
justice" is never speculatively defined, as in Greek philosophy,
but rigorously defined by reactions to injustice in particular
situations.

The "severity" of God's judgement is matched by the "good-
ness" of His mercy. In the dialogue between the individual
and God, this validates itself as the indeterminate possibilities
of self-realization and fulfillment of the self s potentialities
once it has ceased to seek fulfillment of life from the stand-
point of itself. The problem of how the mercy of God is re-
lated to His justice is a perpetual problem in the Old Testa-
ment. The new Biblical faith of Christianity enters into history
with the affirmation that the drama of Christ's life is in fact

6$ THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

a final revelation, in which this problem is clarified by the
assurance that God takes the demand of His justice upon Him-
self through Christ's suffering love and therefore "God was in
Christ reconciling the world unto Himself."

The dying and rising again of Christ is the key to the self's
possibilities in history. All of life is given this norm for the
realization of selfhood. "I am crucified with Christ," declares
St. Paul, "nevertheless I live." This theme is in perfect harmony
with the words attributed to Jesus in the Johannine Gospel:
"Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it
abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."
(John 12:24)

Thus the encounter of the self with God is defined in Bibli-
cal faith in terms of a norm which has been set by an historical
"revelation." And this revelation is an historical event or series
of events which are not essentially miraculous (miracles such
as the "virgin birth" are afterthoughts) but are events in his-
tory which are discerned by faith to have revelatory power into
the ultimate mystery. Both Biblical religions are covenant
faiths, which organize covenant communities upon the basis of
a common commitment of faith in the divine significance of
these events. We must postpone until later, then, a considera-
tion of the relation of revelation to the drama of history. In
this connection it is necessary to observe that the discernment
of ultimate significance of an historic event makes the Biblical
religions seern primitive and unsophisticated in the eyes of
both rationalists and mystics, who look for the ultimate or
"unconditioned" in either the permanent structures of exist-
ence or in an undifferentiated ground of being. They may fail
to note, however, that the Biblical presupposition is the only
one of the three alternatives which asserts a discontinuity be-
tween the self and God. This discontinuity makes explicit
faith indispensable in the ultimate dialogue; but it also pre-
vents the self either from usurping the place of the divine for
itself or from imagining itself merged with the divine. If we
test these three alternative solutions for the self's search for
the ultimate by the two tests of consistency or coherence with

THE SELF'S SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE MEANING 67

other truth, and by conformity with established facts subject
to empirical tests, it will soon become apparent that the reli-
gions which tend to the exaltation of finite values and centers
of meaning are most easily ruled out, as indeed they have been
ruled out in principle for centuries. The collective self may be
momentarily imposing; but its mortality is obvious and the
perils to the individual self by its pretensions of divinity are
\ery great.

It is however very significant that a religious solution which
has been ruled out in principle for centuries should have so
much practical force in our day, both in the version of a reli-
gious nationalism and in a pseudo-universalistic Messianic
creed. These contemporary ventures into idolatry are proof of
the difficulty of containing the collective self within any more
general scheme of validity than its own interests. They prove
that an affirmation of historical meaning as we have it in
Western civilization is almost inevitably attended by preten-
tious efforts to close the system of meaning prematurely with
some cherished value of the self at the center of the system.

It is equally significant that modern culture has generated
less plausible and dangerous forms of individualistic preten-
tion, in which the freedom and the uniqueness of the indi-
vidual is asserted in defiance of any systems of consistency or
universal meaning. The romantic revolt of the nineteenth cen-
tury culminated in Nietzsche's effort to achieve the affirmation
of unique vitality of the individual and his transcendence over
the flux o history, thus seeking to combine classical with
Hebraic attitudes toward time and eternity.

It must be apparent that modern existentialism is but an-
other version of this romantic revolt. It has obviously learned
from Biblical faith about the unique freedom of the individual
and the distinction between the self's reason and personality.
It is however unable to make the venture of faith of Biblical
religion and therefore ends in the quasi-idolatrous attitude
of making the individual his own creator and end. "Thus there
is no human nature," declares the French existentialist Sartre,
"because there is no God to conceive it. Man simply is. Not

6$ THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

that he Is simply what he conceives himself to be. But he is
what he wills. ... He Is what he wills to be after that leap
toward existence." *

Heidegger's concern for "authentic being/' for the affirma-
tion of the uniquely human freedom against the necessities
of nature and the inevitability of death, is distantly related
to Nietzsche's defiance of death. It is In the same category of
quasi-idolatry. It may not make the self into its own God but
it asserts the uniqueness of the self without reference to Its
relations to the community or to any general value.

If we rule out the idolatrous and quasi-idolatrous, the Indi-
vidualistic and collectivistic forms of these idolatries, as valid
answers to the self's quest for ultimate meaning even though
we recognize that the popularity of such answers is not con-
fined to past history but is an ever recurring phenomenon,
we are left with the two alternatives of the Biblical faith and
Mr. Huxley's "perennial philosophy" or the mystic answer to
the problem.

The answer of Biblical faith embodies, as we have seen, sev-
eral presuppositions and affirmations which the modern mind
finds particularly difficult, not to say impossible: the person-
ality of God; the definition of the relation between the self
and God as a dialogue; and the determination of the form of
that dialogue in terms of a previous historic "revelation/'
which is an event in past history, discerned by faith to give a
key to the character and purpose of God and of His relation-
ship to man. It is therefore understandable that when con-
fronted with these two alternatives, sophisticated moderns who
have become aware of a depth of selfhood which can not be
comprehended within the limits of the self as a biological
organism or the self as mind, are Inclined to turn to the mystic
alternative in preference to the Biblical one. It is even under-
standable that they should do this at the price of defying the
very ethos of their own life-affirming and history-affirming cul-
ture and choose an alternative which annuls every partial and

* Existentialism and Humanism, p. 28.

THE SELF'S SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE MEANING 69

particular meaning including the particular self. This is under-
standable in the sense that it proves how powerful are the
compulsions to comprehend reality in a self-consistent scheme
and to leave the mystery beyond the system of rational intel-
ligibility unsolved.

Thus Professor Stace uttered a cry of despair some years ago
because he became aware that the world which modern science
explicated had no place for the human self or for any of the
values which the self holds dear. Subsequently he published
his considered answer to this problem in his Time and
Eternity. He had accomplished his escape from the naturalistic
prison by embracing the "perennial philosophy" of Mr. Huxley
and the oriental mystics. He defined religion as the search for
"the impossible, the unattainable and the inconceivable." Pro-
fessor Stace thus bears testimony to the capacity of the self to
reach for the ultimate; but he is sceptical of any venture of
faith in an ultimate which would purify and complete the
particular meanings of history. He finds it more acceptable to
assert the pure mystery of the divine. He is impressed by the
fact that the mystic approach arrives at the conclusion that
God is both the fullness and the absence of being. Reporting
on the account of divinity in the mystic tradition, he records
that "God is non-Being, nothingness, emptiness, the void, the
abyss . . . God is the great silence, the great darkness . . .
yet God is also in the language of the medieval mystics, the
supreme reality, the f ens reahssimum.' " "This supreme God,"
he declares, "is contrasted by the mystics with the worthlessness
of the world . . . the world then is worthless trash. This is
seen by all men more dimly or more clearly, but it is seen by
the mystics with absolute clarity." 2

Professor Stace refers frequently to the Hindu desire to
achieve unity of the self and God, to realize the assurance that
"Brahman and Atman are one." This seems to him to be pure
religion in comparison with the religions of the Bible with
their appreciation of particular selfhood.

2 Time and Eternity, p. 126.

7# THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

The Impulse to annul the meaning of particular selfhood
and the significance of the whole drama of existence is ex-
pressed even more significantly in the view of the eminent
philosopher George Santayana. Despite his essential Platonism,
and his consequent faith in a "realm of essences/' Santayana
makes it clear, in his Platonism and the Spiritual Life, that the
final goal of religion must be to transcend even these ghostly
structures of particular meaning. "At the risk of parting com-
pany with Dean Inge, or even with Plato/' he declares, "the
spiritual life is not a worship of values, whether found in
things or hypostasized into supernatural powers. It is the exact
opposite. It is the disintoxication from their influence. . . .
The great masters of the spiritual life are evidently not the
Greeks, not even the Alexandrian Greeks, but the Indians and
their disciples elsewhere in the East; and those Moslems, Jews
and Christians who have surrendered precisely that early unre-
generate claim to be enveloped in a protecting world/* San-
tayana makes it quite clear that such a faith annuls all historic
possibilities and responsibilities. "Obligations are moral," he
writes, "they presuppose physical and social organisms and
immanent spontaneous interests. . . . All values fall within
the preview of ethics, which is a part of politics. Spirituality is
the supreme good for those who are called to it, the few intel-
lectuals who can be satisfied only by the impartial truth and
by the self-annihilating contemplation of all being." 3

It is rather revealing that Santayana reserves the mystic
summum bonum for a few intellectuals. It reveals how aristo-
cratic is the conception, and how closely mysticism is related
to rationalism. From Aristotle to Santayana, mysticism is in
fact the perennial overtone of rationalism. The drama of his-
tory is not comprehended in the categories of meaning sup-
plied by either the rationalists or the mystics. In the one case
the categories fail to comprehend the dramatic variety and
the complex causal relations of history. In the other case the
mystic conception of the fulfillment of meaning obviously

s Pp. 3440.

THE SELF'S SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE MEANING 71

results In the annulment of any particular meaning in history.

It will be regarded as futile by all pure "empiricists" to
compare the Biblical and the mystic conceptions of the ulti-
mate dimension of selfhood and to judge between the thesis
that the self is in "dialogue with God" and the thesis that the
self on that level is in the process of merging with a universal
divine consciousness. But if the evidence of introspection is
accepted (though it is admittedly inexact) it can not be too
difficult to prove that the abstraction of the universal subject
from the self as particular object is a futile procedure because
the particular self always remains obtrusively in these exercises
of introversion. There is furthermore the social evidence that
the mystics never succeed in eliminating particular selfhood
or in transcending the self as a particular organism. The erotic
overtones In the mystic visions of an absolute consciousness is
a rather pathetic symbol of the futility of the self's attempt to
escape from the "body" and time Into an undifferentiated
eternity.

In short, we are confronted with evidence that the thesis of
Biblical faith, that the self is in dialogue with a God who must
be defined as a "person" because He embodies both the struc-
ture of being and a transcendent freedom, is more valid than
the alternative theses which find much greater favor among
the sophisticated. The Biblical thesis requires a more explicit
act of faith because it leaps a gap of discontinuity between
man and God and because It dares to give a specific meaning
to the divine, which is relevant to the partial and fragmentary
meanings of history. It both fulfills and corrects these mean-
Ings, loyalties and values, and therefore has a more valid atti-
tude to the self's historic existence which the various ration-
alistic systems affirm too simply and the mystic thesis annuls
too absolutely. This character of Biblical faith is therefore the
crux of the question, why a faith which is more explicit than
alternative ones should be more justified by actual experience
than these. It gives a key to the seeming mystery of our whole
cultural history. That mystery is why an allegedly "dogmatic"
faith should be justified by the experiences of the human self

72 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

more than the allegedly "empirical" approaches to selfhood,
which obscure their potent, though implicit, dogmas within
their prescriptions for empirical observation.
We must examine this strange paradox by an historical

analysis of the long debate between the Biblical-dramatic and
the rational approaches to the problems of the self in the his-
tory of Western civilization.

Part

THE TWO COMPONENTS OF WESTERN
CULTURE AND THEIR ATTITUDES TOWARD THE
SELF.

THE HEBRAIC COMPONENT IN ITS
APPRECIATION OF DIALOGUE, FREEDOM AND HIS-
TORY. ITS INDIFFERENCE TOWARD NATURE. ITS
TRUST IN AN HISTORICAL "REVELATION" FOR A
DISCLOSURE OF THE MEANING OF THE HISTORICAL
DRAMA. THE HELLENIC COMPONENT, ITS SEARCH
FOR THE STRUCTURES AND PATTERNS WHICH UN-
DERLIE THE FLOW OF DRAMA AND HISTORY.

ITS INTERPRETATION OF THE SELF AS MIND. THE
HEBRAIC AND HELLENIC COMPONENTS IN REF-
ORMATION AND RENAISSANCE. THE CHANGE IN
MODERN CULTURE FROM INTEREST IN STRUCTURE
TO PROCESS; FROM MIND TO NATURE. THE EFFORT
TO UNDERSTAND MAN AS PART OF NATURE.

Chapter J3

THE HEBRAIC AND THE HELLENIC
APPROACHES TO THE PROBLEM OF
SELFHOOD AND HISTORY

We

e have sought to interpret the unique char-
acter of human selfhood without particular references to the
presuppositions which governed the inquiry except the fre-
quent references to the misunderstanding of the self which was
occasioned by the identification of the self with mind. This
had an obvious origin in Greek philosophy and has persisted
through the whole course of our Western civilization. Our
analysis of presuppositions became more explicit as we finally
turned to the examination of the religious dimension of self-
awareness and found that a rationalistic approach to the prob-
lems of the self easily leads to a mystic one. There is a path
not only from Plato to Aristotle, but from Plato to Plotinus in
the history of Greek culture. And both Aristotle and Plotinus
fail to understand the self in its wholeness, its uniqueness, its
particularity, and in its involvement in the dramatic realities
of history.

The simple fact is that the same Greek component in our
culture which is responsible for laying the foundations of all
our philosophy and sciences and is celebrated by every intelli-
gent person as the fountain and source of what is "enlight-

75

76" THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

ened" in our history is also responsible for all our most serious
misunderstandings about man and his history. These misun-
derstandings have two sources in Greek rationalism. The one
is the failure to distinguish between the self and its mind, re-
sulting in the illusion that the true self is mind, subordinating
the passions tcf rational control. The other is that the history,
which the self elaborates and in which it is involved, proceeds
on a "rational," that is to say an ontological, pattern. The
drama in history is obscured by the alleged ontological frame-
work of history. For "ontology" means the "science of being."
A science of being, to be distinguished from the particular
sciences which analyze the structure of particular beings, seems
confronted with the alternatives which Aristotle and Plotinus
adumbrated. Either being is defined as an essential structure
which is represented as the final cause, determining all proc-
esses of actualization; or being is described as an undiffer-
entiated "ground" of all particular realities from which they
emanate. In either case, the ontological analysis of selfhood
and of history is productive of error. Historical drama is
equated with natural occurrence by Aristotle because the forms
and structures determine actualization as much in the his-
torical, as in the natural, scene. History, on the other hand,
is made meaningless by Plotinus. It is merely an emanation
from an eternal ground, and its actions have no significance.
Aristotle can not find the particular self. The self's mind is
identical with a universal mind. Plotinus also seeks emanci-
pation from particular selfhood, not however by rational but
by mystic means, that is, by extricating universal consciousness
rather than universal mind from particular selfhood.

Modern ideas of a temporal process have altered these al-
ternatives somewhat. But they have not succeeded In giving
the self or its dramas any real significance.

There is no doubt, on the othfer hand, about the wholeness
of the self in its finiteness and freedom, about the height of
that freedom above the limits of formal reason, about the
dramatic reality of history, and about the distance and the
relation of God to that drama, in the culture of the Hebrews,

THE HEBRAIC AND THE HELLENIC APPROACHES 77

which furnishes the other component of our Western civiliza-
tion, and which is embodied in the Bible. It is commonly
asserted that we have our religion, and possibly our ethics,
from the Hebraic side, and our philosophy from the Hellenic
side, of our heritage. This generalization is, broadly speaking,
correct, but it does not point accurately to the peculiar virtues
and defects of each part of our heritage. It does not do justice
to the fact that there is a yearning after the ultimate in the
Hellenic, as in the Hebraic culture; and that there are ethical
and religious concepts in both. But the Hellenic is defective
in understanding the self and its dramas because it tries to
understand both rationally and ontologically. The Hebraic,
on the other hand, is defective in analyzing any permanent
structure in the flow of temporal events. For the one history
is made into another dimension of nature; and for the other
nature is subsumed under history. Both nature and history are
understood as standing under a divine sovereignty, rather than
as subject to self-explanatory laws. Thus the one culture mis-
understands human selves and their history, where freedom
is more apparent than laws. The other misunderstands nature
because it is primarily to be understood in terms of analyzable
laws.

The Hellenic heritage has been so serviceable in our under-
standing and "conquest" of nature and has won such increas-
ing prestige by these accomplishments that it has threatened
to discredit the Hebraic component more and more, relegating
its characteristic insights to outmoded "superstitions" at the
precise moment in history in which its insights would be most
serviceable in understanding man's history; and the more
consistently a proud Hellenic culture tended to misinterpret
that tragic drama, the more its philosophies and sciences be-
came "empirical" and more intent upon the "facts."

Christianity is commonly believed to be a joint product of
Hebraic and Hellenic cultures. This is true only in the sense
that, beginning with the Johannine literature in the Bible, it
sought to come to terms with the Greek concept of the perma-
nent structure in things, and has embodied in its own life the

7# THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

permanent tension between the Greek and the Hebraic ways
of apprehending reality. But this does not change the fact that
when it is true to itself, it is Hebraic rather than Hellenic. It
believes in a personal God despite the embarrassment of its
philosophers. It has, as Judaism, the other religion of the
Bible, the sense of a covenant community based on commit-
ments and memories of past revelations; and it relies on these
historic revelations to penetrate the divine mystery rather than
upon an analysis of the permanent or "eternal" structures
through which the temporal events flow. It is therefore Hebraic
rather than Hellenic in its essence, even though in popular
piety the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul has usurped
the Hebraic idea of the "resurrection of the body." This usurpa-
tion is significant because the idea of the resurrection clearly
implies the finiteness of historical man and the wholeness of
the person in his finiteness and freedom. That there should be
a transmutation of that person "in the resurrection" can clearly
only be held "by faith." On the other hand, it is supposedly
more rational to believe that an immortal soul flees from a
mortal body upon death. It may seem a more rational belief,
but it rests upon a very dubious distinction between an im-
mortal "mind" and a mortal body. This distinction is the key
to the Greek understanding of the self.

The sharpness of the contrast between Hellenic and Hebraic
ways of knowing must not obscure the similarity of their
origins. Both cultures began with a poetic-dramatic appre-
hension of historic reality, which was probably not so different
from the poetic ways of knowing in all early cultures and
analyzed so perceptively in Henri Frankfort's Intellectual Ad-
venture of Ancient Man. The similarity was preserved beyond
the primitive beginning of the cultures and was apparent in
the period when a developing reason and imagination refined
the early myths. For this refinement in the Hebrew prophets
and the Greek dramatists was remarkably similar in ethos.
The dramatis personae of Greek drama were real persons, en-
gaged in actual history, subject to conflicting claims upon their
consciences which were not easily resolved. They were actuated

THE HEBRAIC AND THE HELLENIC APPROACHES 79

by compulsions which were derived from their thymos rather
than from the lusts of the body to which the philosophers
attributed all non-rational compulsions.

The persons in Greek drama were not under the illusion
that they could bring all the vitalities of life and history into
a neat order if only the subrational impulses were subordi-
nated to the order of "mind," These persons were men of
spirit, who were betrayed into evil by the same capacity which
made their creativity possible: their freedom over natural im-
pulses. The Dionysian impulses may have been at war with the
Apollonian sense of order in Greek tragedy. Butthere is no
suggestion of a war between the mind and t^e^oHyTTEat
division was introduced by the philosophers.

The idea of an inner conflict in man does, however, intro-
duce the first real difference between the Greek and the He-
braic analysis of the human situation. The Promethean theme
in Greek tragedy and the myth of the Fall in the Bible both
deal with the inclination of man to defy the limits set for him
as a creature. But they arrive at different answers of the
problem.

Both in the 'Tall" myth in the Bible and in the Promethean
theme in Greek drama this tendency, defined as hybns or
pride, is regarded as the root of evil rather than the subra-
tional impulses of nature. But in the Promethean theme, Zeus
is regarded as motivated by an unjustified jealousy against
the creativity of man or agaiast Prometheus, the quasi-divine
protagonist of man. Prometheus is responsible for giving man
all the arts of civilization. It is, in short, not possible to exploit
all the capacities of man and establish civilization without
violating Zeus' rather unjustified restraints upon those capac-
ities. It is unnecessary to say that Zeus is the forerunner of
the principle of order which Greek ontology exalts as the ra-
tional basis of existence. In the "Fall" myth it is not regarded
as inevitable that man offend God in his creativity. God sets
limits for finite man; but those limits do not exclude his
dominion over nature and all that this dominion implies.
God is, in short, much higher than either the order of nature

SO THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

or some principle of rational coherence. He is "transcendent"
to any conceivable order; but He reminds man that there are
limits which he must not exceed. Man's sin consists in a pride
which pretends to defy those limits. Human creativity has
much wider scope than in Greek tragedy. Therefore the Old
Testament does not reveal the ambivalence between Zeus and
Prometheus of Greek tragedy. God is not unjustifiedly jealous;
and the defiance of God is not the tragic prerequisite of man's
creativity. The myth of the "Fall" obviously derives from an
interpretation of the human situation, first elaborated by the
great prophets of Israel. Both this and the Greek dramatists'
interpretation are poetic and dramatic; not ontological. But
the Hebraic frame of meaning is superior because the principle
of meaning is placed in a position of transcendence over the
actual structures of existence. Therefore the whole scope of
human striving does not inevitably violate the principle of
order in human existence. This is the first clearly stated dif-
ference between the Greek and Hebraic modes of "knowing"
God. It is the beginning of what finally becomes a clear dis-
tinction between an "immanent" and "transcendent" God.
This distinction also involves the derivative distinction be-
tween the immanent and the transcendent human self.
Throughout the course of Western history men found the facts
of selfhood to correspond to the symbol of transcendence. But
they never ceased to be apologetic for the "irrational" symbol
of the transcendence of both God and man. In their embarrass-
ment, partly occasioned by the spatial implications in the sym-
bol of transcendence, and partly by the fact that transcendence
could not be fitted into a system of rational coherence, they
violated all the "facts" of experience in order to achieve the
"rationality" of divine or human immanence. One side of our
culture, and significantly that side which was proudest of its
"culture/ 7 took the superiority of Greek monism for granted
and regarded even the most rigorous prophetic monotheism
as a slightly cruder form of the monotheism, which the Greek
philosophers achieved.
From the sixth century, when Xenophanes first seriously

THE HEBRAIC AND THE HELLENIC APPROACHES 81

challenged the anthropomorphic Gods of Homeric legend and
constructed a rigorous rationalistic monism or monotheism,
to the flowering of Greek philosophy in the thought of Plato
and Aristotle, the Greeks were agreed in the proposition stated
by Plato that nous, or mind, was "king of heaven and earth";
that the rational principle of order, immanent in the varie-
gated structures and "natures" of existence, was really God.
And since that time almost every philosopher, even Christian
ones, have celebrated this Greek emancipation from both
parochialism and anthropomorphism. In comparison with this
achievement the faith of the prophets of Israel seemed less
impressive. Did not their God exhibit anthropomorphic traits?
Did He not manifest love and hate and all the passions of a
finite self? Histories of culture had to do some justice to the
Hebraic side of our culture. But the average historian could
not bring himself to any judgement fairer than that of Hegel,
who regarded the Biblical faith as a crude and picturesque
form of poetic thinking which, in every case and every age,
philosophy had to refine. The prophets arrived at their truth
"by revelation and authority" in the words of Gilbert Highet, 1
and their God was, though one and not many, still irrationally
"transcendent." The prophetic achievement could not com-
pare with that of the philosophers who had achieved a con-
ception of God thoroughly "immanent"* in the world's processes
and established as a certainty by the most rigorous rational
disciplines.

There is, in fact, a rather rapid descent from the apprecia-
tion of the "existing individual" in Greek drama to the loss
of the individual in the ontological systems of Greek philos-
ophy. The individual is partly known and partly obscured
in Socrates' thought. His dialogic procedure, his emphasis
upon the maxim "know thyself," his belief that his conscience
was "a little God" with which he conversedall revealed an
awareness of the realities of the inner and outer dialogue in
which the self is engaged. In Plato this residual understanding

i Man's Unconquerable Mind.

2 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

Is partly obscured by his elaboration of the dictum of Socrates
that "men would do the good if they only know it." The
supremacy of the mind and its identification with the self is
established. The Eros doctrine of Plato however is a qualifica-
tion on the later mind-body dualism. For it assumes that the
rnind has the task not only o suppressing and ordering the
physical impulses of the self, but of transmuting the "spirited"
element of the self beyond its immediate goals to the ultimate
ones. Thus the idea of "intellectual Eros'* is elaborated. It
does not, of course, change the essential contempt of the body
in Greek dualism. Those who "take themselves to women and
beget children" are regarded as engaged in a lower enterprise
than those who harness thymos to the search for "truth, beauty
and goodness." These insights into the complexities of the
self s creativities are more consistently obscured in the ration-
alism of Aristotle. He excludes self-knowledge specifically from
the competence of the mind, acknowledges that the mind is
involved in the body, but insists that pure mind is impersonal
and universal. It is, as it were, provisionally imprisoned in
the body. It is the "form of forms" and therefore the principle
of meaning for all sensible things in their structures and forms.
Thus the inconvenient self is dissipated into mind; and mind
into the structures of existence.

The identification of mind or nous with God and the belief
that the rational order is really the creative principle of life
is succinctly and religiously expressed in the words of Anaxa-
goras: "Everything else has a share of everything. Nous, how-
ever, is infinite and self-ruling and is mixed with nothing, but
is alone itself by itself. For if it were not by itself but mixed
with something else, it would not share in all things, it would
not have a share in all things if it were mixed with any. . . .
Mind arranged all such things as were to be and were (that is
things which now are not) and such as are present; and it
arranged this whirling, too, which the stars and the sun and
the moon and the air and the etheras they separate off
perform/' 2 Thus did the Greek mind identify meaning with

2 Werner W. Jaeger: Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 160,
Oxford University Press.

THE HEBRAIC AND THE HELLENIC APPROACHES 83

rational intelligibility and state its confidence in the power
of reason, which remains a strong motif in our culture and
expresses itself in even such strong an ti- Aristotelian philoso-
phers as John Dewey.

Rationalists of all ages of Western history have regarded the
rigorous monotheism of the Hebraic prophets as inferior to
this philosophical monism. But they did not observe that the
God of the prophets convicted all particular forces in history,
including the "elect" nation and its "rulers" and "princes," of
violating the divine command of justice while the Greek
philosophers were complacent about the social realities of the
Greek city-state and lived under the illusion that the rulers
were the instruments of justice because they possessed a higher
measure of mind. In short, the contingent character of all
social achievements was discerned by prophetism and obscured
by even the most sophisticated Greek philosophy. The God of
the prophets made judgements which left even the elect nation
uneasy. The God of Aristotle was a universal mind with which
the mind of the philosopher claimed a complacent identity. So
the tension between the finite self and the divine self was
obscured.

The contrast between the two forms of monotheism was re-
vealed even more clearly in their attitudes toward the "rulers"
of their respective civilizations. The prophets were severely
critical of the rulers or "elders" of Israel. Their criticism was
directed at their pride and injustice. ("They turn aside the
needy at the gate," declared Amos; and Isaiah charged that
"the spoil of the poor is in their houses.") This happened to
be an accurate description of the actual behavior of ruling
groups throughout the ages.

In contrast we have both Plato's and Aristotle's complacent
acceptance of the aristocratic structure of Hellenic society, and
Aristotle's conviction that some men were "by nature" slaves.
The basis of this conviction was clearly their confidence in the
"reason" of the "guardians" as a source of justice and as the
agent of order in the pohs. Ignorant men would strive for im-
mediate ends, but the "philosophers" would, with superior
intelligence, strive for more inclusive ends and thus create a

84 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

political order which would imitate the cosmic order created
by the divine mind. The provisional truth in this assessment
of the human situation lies in the fact that some men excel
others in the rational comprehension of the forces and factors
which are involved in any political situation. These are the
potential rulers in a community. But their superior rational
endowment guarantees nothing in regard to the justice with
which they will wield their power or exercise their eminence.
The basic fallacy of the Greek philosophers was to regard the
rational faculty as the source of virtue. This error was partly
due to their failure to recognize the ability of the self to use
its reason for its own ends. It was partly due to the inclination
to find in the sub-rational impulses the cause of confusion and
egoism in human behavior. This error was to be repeated
again and again in the history of Western thought. It has made
the whole Greek tradition inferior in the understanding of
human nature to the Hebraic one. Nevertheless the Greek
tradition is still preferred to the Hebraic because it displays
a neater coherence of the world, of the self and the world, and
o the self and God. For the world, the self and God are all
contained within the continuities of "reason/'

The Hebraic tradition, which is allegedly more crude and
less rational, is still relegated to the sphere of "pre-scientific"
or "pre-philosophical" thought. It is, despite these prejudices,
more "empirical" than the Greek tradition. Its superior em-
pirical accuracy consists in its understanding of the wholeness
of the human self in body, mind and soul, in the appreciation
of the dramatic variety of the self's encounters with other
selves in history, and in the discontinuity between the self
and God. The self feels itself in dialogue with God. In this
dialogue, God is not the "wholly other"; but he is certainly the
divine other.

The self is not related to God by sharing its reason with
God and finding a point of identity with the divine through
the rational faculty. The self is related to God in repentance,
faith and commitment. All these forms of relation imply a
certain degree of existential discontinuity with God. The self

THE HEBRAIC AND THE HELLENIC APPROACHES 85

is always a creature, conscious of its finiteness, and equally
conscious of its pretension in not admitting its finiteness.
Insofar as it becomes conscious of its pretensions it is capable
of repentance and a new life. The encounter with God is In
short a dramatic one. The personal encounter takes place in
the context of a framework of meaning defined by a collec-
tive encounter between God and His people. The prophets
speak to Israel, and finally to individuals in Israel (partic-
ularly in the case of Jeremiah and Ezekiel) on the basis of the
assumption that God has a covenant with Israel. This cove-
nant is at once the presupposition and the fruit of prophetic
inspiration. The Covenant of God with Israel is an article of
faith. It is not altogether clear whether it was Moses or Abra-
ham who was the human agent of the covenant. This indicates
either a confusion in the tradition or perhaps the collation of
two traditions, perhaps stemming respectively from Palestinian
and Egyptian sources. But the confusion does not prevent the
gradual consolidation of the idea of the covenant and its serv-
ice as the ground upon which prophetic thought proceeds.
The circular movement between the presupposition of pro-
phetic thought and its consequence will disturb the rational-
ists. There is a perfect analogy in the thought of the early
Church about the "second Covenant" in Christ. For the
"Christ event" is at once the presupposition of the faith of
the early Church and the consequence of the increasing con-
fidence of this community of faith that the drama of the Christ
event which was the basis of its life disclosed both the kernel
of meaning in the mystery of the divine and provided a norm
for the life of man: Both were comprehended in the agape of
Christ.

Prophetic consciousness assumed a covenant between a God,
"who laid the foundations of the earth/' a God who did not
depend for His prestige upon the victory of a nation, who was
sovereign of both nature and history; and a particular people.
The Covenant is involved in the same scandal of Einmaligkeit
as is the later Christian revelation. A particular event in his-
tory is believed to be the clue to the mystery of the divine maj-

$ THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

esty, which is sovereign over all of history. In the modern mind
(and for that matter the classical mind) such revelations are
identified with theophanies which the credulous believe and
the intelligent reject while they look for the ultimate in either
a principle of rational order in the world or in a mystery which
annuls all historic purposes and meanings.

But meanwhile the prophets gave ample testimony of the
fact that they were in encounter with the "true" God rather
than the idols of human imagination. From that encounter
they returned to preach judgement upon the "elect" but re-
bellious nation. They warned against the prophets "that
make you vain. They speak a vision of their own heart and
not out o the mouth of the Lord/' They proved the falsity of
their imaginings, these false prophets, by increasing the com-
placency of the human heart, intent upon its own ends: "They
say still unto them that despise me, 'the Lord hath said you
shall have peace'; and they say unto every one who walketh
after the imagination of his own heart, no evil shall come unto
you." (Jeremiah 23:17) The prophets did not engage in the
fruitless debate whether "religion," or "reason," was most
serviceable in eliminating human vanity. They knew very
well that the religion of false prophets accentuated human
vanity and pretension. "Can any hide himself in secret places
that I shall not see him? saith the Lord," Jeremiah continues,
"Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord, I have heard
what the prophets said, that prophesy lies in my name, saying,
I have dreamed, 1 have dreamed . . . The prophet that hath
a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that hath my word, let
him speak my word faithfully." (Jeremiah 23:24-28) It might
be observed that rational discrimination is undoubtedly a
resource in distinguishing religious visions which are in the
service of human pretension and the "word of the Lord'* which
punctures all human vanities. But it must also be apparent
that the prophets had no difficulty in distinguishing between
a genuine word of the Lord, which was "sharper than a two-
edged sword," and the "dreams" and "imaginations" of the
false prophets. The latter always accentuated human com-
placency and pretension.

THE HEBRAIC AND THE HELLENIC APPROACHES 87

It was left to a later Alexandrian Jew, Philo, anxious to
make the prophetic tradition acceptable to the Greek world,
to interpret the prophetic encounter with God as "ecstatic,"
which is to say, as consisting of precisely those "imaginations"
which the prophets defined as the marks of the "false
prophets." For the Greek culture could understand "ecstasy"
as the visions of men who were "beyond themselves"; and it
might even make religious ecstasy more tolerable by purging
it of caprice and identifying it with mystic efforts of the self
to escape from itself. Thus the effort to make the scandal of
prophetic consciousness acceptable to the Greek mind robbed
it of its genius. 3

The community of the covenant was maintained, on the
one hand, by prophetic interpretations of the Covenant, which
had the effect of increasing the sense of the significance of the
Covenant and of purging the Covenant people of any false
pride and security because of their "elect" status. It was pre-
served, on the other hand, by memories of critical historic
events by which the people were separated out and became a
"peculiar" people, part nation and part church. The force of
these historic memories, refreshed by liturgical observances
year by year (most of which were festival of nature religions
transmuted into historical anniversaries) the force of these
memories has been powerful enough to preserve the self-iden-
tity of a nation through the centuries, though it has lacked a
"homeland" and lived in the "diaspora" for many centuries un-
til very recently. The other means of survival has been the ob-
servance of the Torah, the law, about which a Christian can
not speak sympathetically because one of the reasons for the
emergence of a "new Covenant" was precisely the problem of
the adequacy of the law as a mediator between man and God
in the final encounter. It is possible only to say as one who
stands by religious commitment outside this Covenant, that
the religious consciousness of the Jews is determined from the
beginning by two strains, legalistic and prophetic, which were
expressed in the very idea of the covenant. For it was the

3 C/. Abraham Heschel: Die Prophetic (shortly to be had in English
translation).

88 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

Sovereign of history ("I am the Lord thy God, who brought
thee out of the land of Egypt") who also enjoined the precepts
of the Decalogue which follows that introduction. For the
Christian it would seem that the "new covenant" is the fulfill-
ment of the prophetic consciousness about God, man and his-
tory and the negation of the legalistic interpretation. But he
must certainly guard against the misinterpretations which
have contrasted the New Testament as containing a "re-
ligion of the Spirit" with the Old Testament, as a "religion
of the law/ " Certainly, despite the ages of post-exilic legal-
ism In Judaism, the prophetic-dramatic-historical genius of
prophetism was sufficiently vital in Judais ^ % to produce two
thinkers, Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Ik/ y ^, in our own
generation, who perceived the realities c r " h human and
divine "selfhood" and of the dramatic ^ ^ter of history
more acutely than any Christian theologian.

Furthermore, if Jewish legalism proved as inadequate as
Christian obscurantism in dealing with "modern" situations
and the modern man's quest for rational understanding of his
world, both survived in an unfavorable environment because
their approach to the mystery and meaning^of the self and of
God, and of the reality of human history, made their "fool-
ishness" a source of wisdom. It might be necessary to cherish
this wisdom in a corner but it was cherished nevertheless by
men who knew themselves to be selves and to be in encounter
with God, in ages in which this dimension of human existence
was denied. The fact that such men as Spinoza and Freud, not
to speak of Philo, were Jews, and that Maimonides was as
anxious in the medieval period to conform Judaism to Aris-
totle's wisdom as Aquinas was to conform Christianity, merely
proves how difficult it was to appreciate the peculiar genius of
one's own culture and faith in ages in which everything tended
to make that faith seem to be primitive and picturesque but
not rationally respectable.

Chapter

FAITH AND DOGMA IN THE NEW
COVENANT COMMUNITY

JLiie structures of meaning in religions of history
and revelation are undoubtedly sustained by specific and ex-
plicit acts of faith in contrast to those world views which also
have some ultimate principle of meaning but which seek to
obscure the act of faith which sustains them by making the
system appear to be sustained by a rationally analyzable co-
herence.

Thus, for instance, the obscurity of meaning in the Pro-
phetic interpretation gave rise to the Messianic faith that God
would "act" to eliminate the obscurities. These obscurities and
ambiguities can be briefly enumerated. Reward and punish-
ment were not justly apportioned to virtue and vice. The inno-
cent suffered and the "wicked flourished like a green bay tree/'
Israel itself, which rightly stood under divine condemnation
according to the prophets, was nevertheless an innocent suf-
ferer compared to the mighty nations which were the exec-
utors of divine judgement. When would the "righteous" be
vindicated? When would Israel be vindicated? When would
the tension between the law and the inclination of the human
heart be overcome by a "new covenant" providing for a law

89

9Q THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

written Into the human heart? (Jeremiah) These obscurities
persuaded the more rationalistic Greeks either to dismiss his-
tory as having no moral meaning or to hope that "reason"
would gradually eliminate its obscurities and cross purposes.
The prophets hoped instead that the drama of history would
be clarified not by the gradual emergence of a logic immanent
within it or by the imposition of logic upon it. It would be
clarified dramatically by a divine action in which the "mercy"
of God first revealed in the covenant would be displayed in a
new way. This dramatic action was "expected" in the sense
that it seemed to follow inevitably from the "constancy" of the
divine mercy. But it was also unpredictable in the sense that
mercy was not subject to any law inherent in history. It must
be observed that many human ends, which can not be regarded
as ultimate, were supposed to be vindicated in that final vin-
dication. Israel was to be restored as a nation. (Is the establish-
ment of the present State of Israel a fulfillment of that Mes-
sianic promise?) The "righteous" were to be vindicated de-
spite the fact that in the final reaches of prophetic insight
there were no significant distinctions between the righteous
and the unrighteous. The "innocent" were to be avenged
despite the fact that it seems to be a permanent character of
history to establish norms which are equally painful for both
the criminals and for the truly innocent.

In short, there were many false expectations in the hope
of this dramatic Messianic denouement.

The Christian community came into historic being by a
common venture of faith that this expected act of God took
place in the whole drama of Christ's life. Christ had to be
accepted by an act of faith, for the event took place in history
and nothing takes place so inevitably that it can be proved to
be the natural consequence of the previous "conditions of his-
tory." The early Church accepted Christ as the "expected"
one, as the "desire of the ages." It interpreted the "new cove-
nant" as a logical extension of the first covenant. But this faith
could not compel the original nation-church to accept him.
He was rejected by the original covenant community, and

FAITH AND DOGMA IN THE NEW COVENANT COMMUNITY 91

there were thus two, rather than one, faiths. At best, the two
can regard themselves as two versions of one faith, each think-
ing of the other as an heretical version of the common faith.
Since such faith is by commitment, the interpretation of the
faith can not follow as a rational deduction from the given
facts. Yet faith can not be irrational or capricious. It must
validate itself as an interpretation of the facts of existence.

Looking at these facts from the standpoint of the commit-
ments of the Christian faith, they would appear as follows:
The Christ event which Christian faith regards, retrospectively,
as the culmination of history could not be regarded prospec-
tively as such a fulfillment. It is however the more impressive
retrospectively because it could not be fully anticipated. It is
the more impressive because some of the expectations hoped
for the fulfillment and vindication of forces and factors in his-
tory (the nation and the "righteous") which do not deserve to
be singled out as the bearers of historic fulfillment. The Christ
was expected to be a triumphant Messiah, and he is in fact a
"suffering servant" who does not bring the struggle between
good and evil to a triumphant conclusion. Instead, the drama
of his life reveals that the nominally "righteous" are involved
in the crucifixion and that the only resolution of the variance
between God and man was for God to take the sins of men
upon Himself. Thus the suffering Messiah became, in the eyes
of faith, a clue to the mystery of the mercy and the justice of
God, and the atonement became the real content of the revela-
tion. On these grounds the Christ event was recognized to be
the "end" of history, not in the sense of its "finis" but as its
telos. History would go on, and human pride and arrogance
would create unimaginable evils. But nothing would surprise
or dismay the person who had once penetrated to the mystery
by the help of this key.

It is important to note that the analysis of the whole human
situation anticipates the unlimited possibilities for good and
evil in every human life and of developing human freedom in
history, and of the continued variance between men and God
whenever human actions are ultimately considered.

5?2 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

In short, the truth of the interpretation of life and history,
derived from the revelation in Christ is most apparent at those
points at which the revelation outraged and disappointed the
Messianic expectations and defied the canons of "rationality"
which were subsequently used to justify or to refute the truth
of the revelation. We shall have occasion later to analyze the
corruptions which have obscured this truth whenever men
have sought to accommodate it to their perspective* It is true
precisely because it comes as a refutation of partial and paro-
chial viewpoints, and of the desire of men and nations, of
priests and philosophers, of cultures and civilizations to vindi-
cate themselves. It can be empirically verified as the truth, but
it can not be anticipated or established by an empirical analy-
sis of any human situation because every such empirical analy-
sis will lack the challenge to the egoistic corruption in the
viewpoints of nations, cultures and classes, which insinuate
themselves into every definition of the ultimate truth, and will
reduce the height and significance of human freedom in order
to fit the human drama into some scheme of natural or rational
coherence.

The Christian Church soon faced the problems of prevent-
ing a truth apprehended by faith, and not subject to the tests
of coherence which govern the test of truth in philosophy and
science, from degenerating into private caprice. What was to
prevent anyone from appropriating this revelation and cor-
rupting it according to his own fancy?

The answer to this problem was the establishment of the
authority of the covenant community, the Christian Church,
which would try to reach a consensus on the interpretation of
the revelation and prevent the caprice of private visions and
fancies. In a series of Church Councils dealing primarily with
the Christological issue, that is, with the question of the sig-
nificance of the Christ revelation, the agreements which were
arrived at were promulgated as "dogmas." The word "dogma"
was adapted from Roman imperial usage in which it meant
imperial decree. It has achieved a hated connotation in the
lexicon of modernity, for it connotes the arbitrary assertion of

FAITH AND BOGMA IN THE NEW COVENANT COMMUNITY 93

what can not be proved scientifically. As a matter of fact, it
was intended to avoid the arbitrariness of private interpreta-
tion and to assure the "public" character of the truth in a
realm of truth in which poetic and dramatic symbols of the
truth did not allow for establishment of the kind of universal
validity which modern science boasts and which the philos-
ophers seek in vain.

In short, dogma, in the best sense, is the inevitable guard
of truth in the realm of history and drama in which a religion
of history and revelation moves, in contrast to the realm of
structures which may be analyzed exactly and meticulously
until unanimity of interpretation is reached Dogma, at its
best, represents the consensus of a covenant community which
lives upon the basis of common convictions and commitments
to a revelation of the truth which can not be accepted as true
in the manner of philosophical and scientific truths, because
the truth does not follow inevitably from the analysis of the
processes of nature and history. We must consider presently
the baneful effects of trying to enforce any such consensus
upon a political community by political power.

Chapter J

DOGMA AND ONTOLOGY IN THE
CHRISTIAN CONSENSUS

JLhe essence of the Christian faith Is drawn from
the Hebraic, particularly the prophetic, interpretation of life
and history, and is erroneously Interpreted as the consequence
o a confluence of Hebraic and Hellenic streams of thought.
However, It must be admitted that the elaboration of the
meaning of the Christian revelation demanded from the very
beginning, that the truth about life and God apprehended In
an historical revelation be brought into conformity with the
truth which may be known by analyzing the structures and
essences of reality on all levels. Historically this meant co-
ordinating these truths with the findings of Greek philosophy
and science. The beginning of this enterprise was made in the
Scriptures, more specifically in the Johannine literature with
its conscious effort to interpret the Messianic faith to the Hel-
lenic world. The Johannine prologue significantly initiates
the story of Christ's life not with the history of his birth, as
in the Synoptics, but by the bold assertion that this Jesus of
history was in fact the "logos made flesh." It appropriated the
Philonic logos concept and Insisted that the logos, the pattern
of creation, the structure of existence, was in fact identical
with this character in history. "The world was made by Him

94

DOGMA AND ONTOLOGY IN THE CHRISTIAN CONSENSUS 95

and without Him was not anything made, that hath been
made." This encounter between "natural" and "revealed"
theology was to provide the pattern for the creative tension
between structural and dramatic ways o apprehending his-
toric reality which have persisted throughout the history of
Western civilization. This is true even if one assumes that the
logos concept of Philo was not purely Hellenic but added some
connotations taken from the Hebraic idea of God's "almighty
and creative word."

The Johannine literature is most instructive when it inter-
prets the love of Christ. His agape corresponds to the created
structure of human existence but it is also a "new Law" re-
vealed in Him: "Brethren," we read in the first Epistle of
John, "I write no new commandment unto you, but an old
commandment which ye had from the beginning. The old
commandment is the word which ye have heard from the
beginning. Again, a new commandment I write unto you; . . .
because the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth."
(1 John 2:7-8) In other words, the agape of Christ is not
arbitrarily imposed upon life. It is "from the beginning"; that
is, it is given in the essential and created nature of man, which
involves a freedom for which love is the only law. But the
historic revelation clarifies that commandment: "for the dark-
ness is past and the true light now shineth." There are nuances
in the agape idea, there is a depth of "grace" of self-giving and
suffering love in agape which does not follow inevitably upon
an analysis of the character of human freedom, but which is an
historic extension of what has been given in the created nature
of man. One might add that neither Plato nor Aristotle was
able to conceive of the idea of agape though their analyses
touched the edges of the mystery as they explored the limits of
eras and of phiha.

The Christian Church elaborated its faith that Christ was
more than a character in history and that the drama of his
life was more than an event in history, by the Trinitarian
dogma, which asserted that the revelation of the divine mys-
tery in Christ was related, on the one hand, to the divine
power of creativity, which was the mystery presupposed in

96 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

all rational analyses of causes. It was, on the other hand, re-
lated to the mystery of the God whom the individual en-
countered in the final reaches of his self-awareness, where he
met God as the "other" who judged and forgave him. This
Trinitarian formula was, though a "stumbling block" to the
Jews, not derived primarily from Greek ontology. It was a
stumbling block because it violated, or seemed to violate, the
rigorous monotheism of Hebraism and also the first command-
ment of the Decalogue, which forbade the construction of an
"image" of the divine mystery. It was nevertheless more He-
braic than Hellenic, for it appealed to two aspects of the divine
mystery, which prophetism acknowledged: the creation and
the personal encounter between God and man. It merely in-
serted the Christ event for the first covenant at the center, and
as the point of revelation of meaning in this mystery. Even
the idea of Christ's pre-existence in the Johannine Prologue
had antecedents in apocalyptic thought, in the concept of a
pre-existent Messiah who was "from the foundations of the
world."

The corollary dogma of the "two natures of Christ" was in-
tended to emphasize the two perspectives in which Christ was
viewed as "truly man," that is, as a character in history and not
a theophany, and "truly God," that is, as a revelation of the
divine mystery, particularly the mystery of God's judgement
and mercy. This dogma did indeed avail itself of Greek spec-
ulative categories, but not with great success. For how could
this man be declared to be at once God and man when it was
the nature of God to be "impassible," and nothing in history
can be "impassible"? Obviously the difficulty was in trans-
posing symbolic, dramatic statements into ontological ones.
But this difficulty has not invalidated the central truth of the
Christian faith, which stands or falls with the assertion of
Christ's uniqueness, however much this affirmation may be a
"stumbling block to the Jews and to the Gentiles, foolishness."
We must consider subsequently how every effort to reduce this
scandal by "liberal" Protestant Christianity, whether they
availed themselves of Kantian, Hegelian or Whlteheadian
ontologies, has led to a blunting of the truth embodied in the

DOGMA AND ONTOLOGY IN THE CHRISTIAN CONSENSUS 97

kerygma and to a consequent misreading of the human situ-
ation, usually with the result of conforming to the sentimen-
talities of our age. For our age did not take seriously enough
the intimate relation between the creative and the evil possibil-
ities of human freedom. This would apply, too, to the recent
efforts of Rudolf Bultmann, engaged in the laudable enterprise
of saving the kerygma while cleansing the message of the Bible
of "pre-scientific" myths. But he ends by equating the kerygma
with the message o existentialist philosophy. The kerygma
was obviously not left untouched because the existentialist
philosophy, while understanding the unique freedom of man,
is more intent to assert it in defiance of death than to acknowl-
edge that it is subject to corruption, that therefore man must
be saved from sin, rather than from death. 1

Bultmann's desire to cleanse the Scripture of "pre-scientific"
myths is in accord with a responsible attitude toward the
dangers inherent in the dramatic and poetic attitudes toward
reality. They may obscure the "laws" and structures on every
level of reality which science analyses and metaphysics seeks
to bring into a total system of coherence. For this task the
Hellenic tools of rational discrimination are more adequate
than the dramatic symbols of the Bible. But Bultmann's failure
to guard the truth in the kerygma, despite his professed con-
cern to leave it untouched, proves that he has not made a
sufficiently sharp distinction between pre-scientific and perma-
nent myths. Pre-scientific myths disregard what may have al-
ways been known, or have now become known, about the
ordered course of events in the world. Permanent myths (it
would be better to use the word "symbol*' to avoid the scepti-
cal connotation of the word "myth*') are those which describe
some meaning or reality, which is not subject to exact analysis
but can nevertheless be verified in experience. The experience
which verifies it and saves the myth from caprice is usually
in the realm of history and of freedom beyond the structures
and laws of existence. Thus the question of myths and symbols
contains the whole problem of the tension between the Hel-

i Rudolf Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth

$8 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

lenic and the Hebraic components of our culture Modern
physics certainly avails itself of symbols as much as does poetry
and religion, but its symbols are verifiable by strict measure-
ment and observation.

There is certainly a great difference between the symbols
by which modern physics describes the realities which have
taken the place of the older concepts of "substance" or "matter,"
and the symbols, for instance, of a dynasty or an historic figure
in its history by which a nation comes to the consciousness
of its unity and continuity. And there is even a greater differ-
ence between the scientific and the religious symbols by which
a community of faith, using events in history, sees in them
clues to the eternal mystery which hovers over and in history.
But these symbols are verifiable on their own level. That "God
was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself is verifiable
in the experience of everyone who experiences the mercy and
new life which flows from true repentance in the encounter
with God. It is also verifiable by the proofs that alternative
methods of explaining or dissolving the mystery and the mean-
ing which governs and surrounds us lead to observable mis-
calculations in regard to the nature of man and of history.
Thus there is a significant distinction between the "myths"
with which a pre-scientific world describes natural phenomena
and the symbol which is central to the structure of Christian
faith, namely, the assertion that a Jesus of Nazareth was the
"Son of the living God."

The Christian Church is certainly guilty of "fideism" when
it affirms that an historically apprehended motif, the agape
of Christ is the chief characteristic of the ultimate "being"
which the Greek philosophers described in purely static terms,
eliminating all temporal character, and which Hebraic thought
described as the Creator. In either case an ontological concept
is involved in the definition of God. But the Christian faith
does not derive its idea of love from the idea of "being." When
Hellenic concepts of "being" are substituted for the idea of a
"creator/' and of the mystery of creation as the ontological
ancjior for the historic revelation, the emphasis is invariably
shifted from the content of the revelation, which is, according

DOGMA AND ONTOLOGY IN THE CHRISTIAN CONSENSUS 99

to the Bible, the reconciliation between God and man on the
divine initiative. The "Incarnation' 'becomes instead the revela-
tion of the eternal in the temporal 2 and the dramatic account
of the reconciliation between God and man is obscured. The
consequent estimate of the human situation is altered so that
the achievement of the "eternal" under conditions of time be-
comes the summum bonum, whereas the Biblical message is
of forgiveness by God toward man and the corresponding for-
giveness which men must practice toward one another and
will practice the more successfully if they realize the fragmen-
tary character of their own virtues and achievements.

An even more striking difference is achieved when the myth
of the 'Tall" in the Bible is transmuted into strictly ontolog-
ical, rather than historical, terms. The Biblical myth seeks to
do justice to both the universality of sin and self-regard and
to the element of personal responsibility in each sinful act.
The fateful universality is accounted for in Christian orthodoxy
by assuming that Adam's first sin is transmitted as a taint from
generation to generation. Beginning with Origen, theologians
under the influence of Platonic philosophy, have changed the
Idea of a universal guilt as historical fate to an ontological one,
that is, to a necessary consequence of man's finiteness.

It is probably significant that finite men should have imag-
ined so persistently that the guilt which they feel is the con-
sequence of their finiteness and particularity. It is significant
because it effectively cancels out their guilt and because it
points to a dimension of their existence from which it Is pos-
sible to survey the whole temporal drama and estimate it as
"appearance" or "illusion." This Platonic transformation of
the Christian concept of the drama of history is nevertheless
a grievous error. It can not be made plausible at all without
imagining a purely hypothetical "transcendent Fall" which
must account for the actual "Fall," that is, the creation of a
temporal world. Augustine's Biblical concepts of selfhood, and
of the corruption of freedom in the self, corrected the Platonic
aberrations of Origen and many of the pre-Augustinian

2 Cf. Lionel Thornton's Incarnate Lord for an Anglo-Catholic inter-
pretation of the Incarnation on the basis of Whitehead's metaphysics.

100 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

fathers o the Church. But nothing could correct the ancillary
consequence of the error, which was to define sin as sensuality
rather than as self-love and to construct a system of salvation
in which ascetic spirituality became the path to redemption.
The seat of sin was placed in the "belly" rather than in the
selL (Origen) Thus the self was withdrawn from judgement.
There is a corruption of every Biblical concept involved in
this Platonism. The ' 'goodness of creation" and the significance
of the whole temporal and historical process is placed in ques-
tion. The wholeness of man in body and soul is made dubious,
and the evil he does is attributed to his finiteness rather than
his freedom and is regarded as an inevitable consequence of
that finiteness.

Augustine arrested for a time this baneful absorption of a
Biblical dramatic faith into an ontology. In him, the Biblical
account of the self in its freedom and wholeness of body and
soul triumphed over Neo-Platonic presuppositions. Perhaps
it was significant that the classical thought-world in which he
was nurtured was Neo-Platonic rather than Platonic or Aris-
totelian. It therefore emphasized mystery beyond meaning
rather than rational structure as the basis of meaning. There
was more room for the elaboration of the significance of the
meanings of the drama of Biblical revelation. Thus Augustine
restored the Biblical accounts of creation, of selfhood, and o
the sin and the grace in the dimension of human freedom.
Augustine was not capable of refuting one other error which
had crept into the interpretation of Biblical truth. That error
was to eliminate the studied paradox of Biblical faith in its
interpretation of redemption. For redemption was, on the
one hand, the emancipation of the self from itself by its devo-
tion to God. It was, on the other hand, the constant forgiveness
and mercy of God toward all men, for even the most devoted
among them would be involved in the sin of setting their will
and interest against the divine, usually by assuming a too neat
identity between the human and the divine will. Augustine
elaborated a fairly complacent idea of grace and perfection
according to which "we may be denominated perfect If we
walk perfectly on the road to perfection." This doctrine per-

DOGMA AND ONTOLOGY IN THE CHRISTIAN CONSENSUS 101

suaded Augustine to draw a sharp line between the civitas del
and the civitas terrena, between the saved and the lost; and
to lay the foundations or to offer the first example of the
perennial inclination of the religious community to make itself
odious by its pretensions of righteousness.
The long history of medieval Christianity was the story of
the gradual consolidation of the synthesis between Biblical-
dramatic and Greek ontological modes of apprehending real-
ity. The synthesis culminated in the thought of Thomas
Aquinas, which became definitive for Catholic thought. In this
synthesis the sense of structure derived from Aristotelian
thought gradually took the place of the more Platonic and
Neo-Platonic sense of a divine mystery above the observable
structures. Since it is necessary to do justice both to the struc-
tural aspect of reality and to elements which appear in man
and his history by reason of human freedom above the struc-
tures, it would seem that the Thomistic synthesis was the most
adequate method of dealing with both aspects of reality. But
the synthesis was inadequate because it did not fully recognize
the degree to which historical freedom reached down into the
structural aspects of life. The Aristotelianism of the Middle
Ages was challenged progressively as the discoveries of his-
torical development in both nature and history made the
Aristotelian ontology otiose.

The most serious consequence of the incorporation of clas-
sical ontology was in the field of ethics where the Biblical idea
of love as the final norm of life was added as an extra " theolog-
ical virtue" together with faith and hope upon an ethical
system defined by the classical conception of "natural law/'
The content of "natural law" was much too specific and the
"intuitions" of reason which were drawn from it were much
too inflexible to do justice to the ever new historical occasions
which appear in history. The moral intuitions also failed to
define the good adequately for man in the wholeness of body
and soul. The most absurd consequence of this classical scheme
was in the field of sex, in which a very negative attitude toward
sex, partly drawn from Hellenic dualism and partly from
Pauline attitudes, was combined with an effort to define the

102 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

function of sex from an analysis of "nature." The consequence
was the prohibition of sexual relations even in marriage
except for the end "intended" by nature, namely procreation.
The fact that a sexual partnership is also a comradeship be-
tween two persons who would express their love for each other
in sexual terms, even beyond the obvious "intention" of "na-
ture," is thus negated. The whole system of classical ethics, as
incorporated into the Biblical mode of thought about the
providence of God in and over history, is highly dubious.
Thomas' assertion that God's providence is expressed in an
"eternal law" and that the "natural law" is the rational crea-
ture's participation in "the eternal law" clearly substitutes
rational ontology for the Biblical dramatic apprehension of
the meaning of history. The rational "intuitions" of natural
law are much too rigid and neat to give adequate moral guid-
ance to men in the unique occasions of history and under the
shifting circumstances of historical development.

If the medieval synthesis is too rational on the one hand,
it does not provide sufficient "rational" checks upon the reli-
gious imagination on the other hand. Thus the religious life
of the Middle Ages had no protection against the growth of
"superstition," against the tendency of reducing concepts of
grace to magic, and of using the ecclesiastical control of magic
as a source of political power.

Whatever errors were incorporated into the medieval syn-
thesis were aggravated by the political supremacy which the
Church established over the whole of the medieval culture. It
is important to analyze the consequences of this supremacy
fully because it had the most fateful consequences in the whole
political and spiritual history of the Western world. It Is al-
ways dangerous to establish any unchallenged human au-
thority because human pretensions tend to grow when they
are not subject to challenge. It is particularly dangerous to
establish a priesthood in such an unchallenged position be-
cause religion lends itself particularly to the pretension of pos-
sessing absolute truth and virtue by finite and sinful men.

The establishment of the Church as the undisputed sovereign
power over a whole culture and civilization is due to unrepeat-

DOGMA AND ONTOLOGY IN THE CHRISTIAN CONSENSUS 103

able historical contingencies. The disintegration of the Roman
Empire left the Church as residuary legatee of this dying world
and as tutor to the yet unformed European culture, making
its way from barbarism to civilization partly by appropriating
the cultural treasures of the civilization which it had van-
quished. These events and facts gave the Church an initial
advantage which it exploited, particularly by using its posses-
sion of the "keys of Heaven" in a religious age, to unlock the
doors of power on earth.

The establishment of papal supremacy was not possible
without violating one of the cardinal tenets of Biblical faith
which asserted that "in God's sight is no man living justified/*
and thus implied the ambiguity of all human virtues and
achievements. The violation of this Biblical affirmation was
made explicit in the claim of the Pope to be "Vicar of Christ"
on earth and to govern the world in the name of Christ. Begin-
ning with this claim, Christianity has been inferior to Hebraic
prophetism in failing to observe a proper distance between the
divine and the human, and not heeding the prophetic warning,
"For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways
higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts'*
(Is. 55.9) .

The effect of this pretension was manifold. Three facets of
It deserve special consideration: (A) It made a religious ex-
perience of the ultimate, which must remain a matter of per-
sonal commitment and repentance, into an article of faith
which could be enjoined by political authority. It thereby
robbed the religious experience of its essential character and
emptied it of both religious meaning and moral prestige. It was
this facet against which the Reformation protested so vehe-
mently. The corruption of religion was aggravated by the gen-
eral tendency to reduce "grace" in the religious life to a power
which could be magically transmitted.

(B) The derivation of political power from the pretensions
of sanctity was very effective In a religious age; but it was
bound to generate increasing resentments, which came to a
head in the Renaissance as well as the Reformation, but which
even pious Catholics anticipated long before the sixteenth cen-

104 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

tury, notably Marsilius of Padua and Dante. Dante, in De
Monarchia, sought desperately to rescue Catholic universalism,
the one virtue of papal absolutism, from the odium in which
it was enveloped by religious pretension of the papal Church.
(C) The papal authority over the whole of culture had
the special effect of giving the concept of "dogma" in religion
a very unfortunate connotation. For "dogma" was the expres-
sion of a religious authority against the growing desires of a
culture to explore all human possibilities, including the pos-
sibilities of investigating every coherence and sequence in the
natural world and history. The compound of Biblical religion
with Aristotelianism was particularly unfortunate because it
^c^ntuatecTthe'iBeFof a'world of fixed and eternal essences
in which deductive rational processes could explore the un-
known upon the basis of the known. Modern empirical science,
beginning with Francis Bacon, was forced to insist on the right
and the necessity of empirically examining "causes" and trac-
ing the actual course of events in nature and in history.

Ironically the empiricism on which Bacon insisted and
which became the basis for all the triumphs of modern science
had to be asserted against the authority of a Christian Aristo-
telianism, though the idea that reality is not totally rational
and that it is necessary to account for "the irrationality of the
givenness of things" is derived from the Biblical doctrine of
creation as contrasted with the classical idea of creation through
the rational forming of the formless matter or the unformed
stuff. But this idea of creation was corrupted so that a
divine act becomes in each particular instance an explanation
of an event, which obviates the necessity of finding a particular
cause for it. Therefore Bacon protested against the effort to
understand nature ex analogia hommis instead of looking for
the laws and structures which actually determined actualiza-
tion. He could hardly anticipate that the empirical method
which he initiated would end by trying to understand man
ex analogia naturae and that the empirical method which
unlocked the mysteries of nature so well would become the
basis of an implicit dogma which obscured the salient facts
about the human situation.

Chapter \ ^

THE SELF AND ITS DRAMAS: REASON
AND NATURE IN THE DISINTEGRA-
TION OF THE MEDIEVAL SYNTHESIS

e have sought to clarify the effect of the syn-
thesis between the Biblical-dramatic forms of thought and the
classical confidence in reason and its emphasis upon a rational
ontology which entered into that synthesis.

With the disintegration of that synthesis under the impact
of the Renaissance and Reformation, one of the effects of the
disintegration was that the Reformation re-emphasized the
Biblical and dramatic approaches to the self and to God, while
the Renaissance separated out the classical identification of
the self and mind, q .r^aso n .and reality j.rid sharpened" the
tools of ra^jnaJj^mmination. This division had some very
marked effects upon our culture. For the Renaissance initiated
movements of culture which led to an even more extravagant
confidence in reason as the source of human virtue than char-
acterized either the classical or the medieval period. But, on.
the other hand, it initiated all the rational disciplines which
have enriched our culture and which finally led to the modern
triumphs of science in the knowledge of nature.

The Reformation, on the other hand, in returning to a
purer Biblical interpretation of the human situation, disclosed
some "facts" about man which are only disclosed on the pre-
supposition of the dramatic encounter between a divine and

105

THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

human self. These facts are validated continually by experi-
ence; and their discovery places the Reformation in the unique
position of contributing to the sum of human knowledge
despite its lack of interest in the pursuit of knowledge and
despite, or perhaps because of, its "fideism" that is its appeal
to faith rather than reason, and its cavalier attitude toward
the disciplines of culture, particularly toward philosophy.
Among its contributions to the understanding of human self-
hood are: the emphasis on the wholeness of the person in body
and soul, derived from the Bible (Luther's totus homo) ; the
conception of the height of human freedom and of^ the en- r
counter of the person with a personal God in this cUmension
of its existence; the idea, of. the. -critical n ,and tojtal^nature^of
this encounter, involving the whole of the person and .^shat-
tering his pride and self-esteem. , This idea, derived from Paul
("I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live") purged
Christian piety of all the complexities introduced by ascetic:
ideals and mystic efforts at flight to the eternal. It places the
religious emphasis upon the final encounter between man and
God, upon the promise of a renewal of life, if human preten :
sion is destroyed in that encounter; and upon the paradox of
a divine mercy and judgement of God which is met in that
encounter. Thus the "Atonement" was seen to be the real
content of the "Incarnation" and the relation between judge-
ment and forgiveness is the real mystery in the divine which
must be clarified. Finally, the Reformation insists that even
the most radical shattering of the old self and the reconstruc-
tion in terms of a commitment beyond itself can not eliminate
sin, that is self-love, in the life of the redeemed.

The Reformation maxim justus et peccator simul, and its
insistence that the redeemed are just as needy of forgiveness
at the end as at the beginning of their striving because the
righteous as well as the sinners are at variance with God,
ultimately considered, clarified a truth of Biblical religion
which remained obscure throughout previous Christian his-
tory. It was in fact partially obscure in both prophetic and
Pauline thought. It was obscure because the prophets insisted,
on the one hand, that the judgement of God would fall with

REASON AND NATURE IN DISINTEGRATION 107

equal severity upon the "circumcized and uncircumcized"
(Jeremiah) but, on the other hand, they had a lively sense
of the difference between the righteous and the unrighteous.
St. Paul was certain that "if any man be in Christ, he is a new
creature" (2 Cor. 5:17) while he also insisted that all human
righteousness was unavailing in God's sight and that men
would be in need of God's mercy, no matter what their moral
attainments might be. The Protestant Reformation may be
said to have clarified the prophetic and the evangelical tradi-
tion by profiting from the ages of testimony on this perplexing
ambiguity in Scripture and in life. The testimony proved that
pretensions of perfection were new causes of sin and conflict
in the world. This discovered or rediscovered truth about man
has a unique relation to the whole enterprise of truth. For it
is an obvious truth to which every kind of experience bears
witness. Yet it is a truth which can not be comprehended
except on the basis of the particular presupposition of the Bib-
lical faith; and it is constantly obscured by the universal in-
clination of men to find some ground of either reason or faith,
of piety or intellectual attainment, which will assure them
of an unambiguous "righteousness" and of the opportunity
to hold their fellow men, who do not share this ground, in
moral contempt. The Reformation did not always exploit this
knowledge about human nature to its full extent; but that
merely proves that even the final truth about man can not
overcome the inclination of the human heart to misuse any
truth for its pride or prestige.

Nor was the Reformation conception about the wholeness
of man in body and soul fully exploited. It did prompt the
Reformation's fierce anti-asceticism, its opposition to the effort
to establish goodness by the suppression of physical desires,
particularly sexual ones. But this anti-asceticism did not suffice
to persuade either Luther or Calvin to rethink the whole
Christian attitude toward man's sexual problem Luther could,
when he thought unsystematically and expressed himself occa-
sionally, rejoice in marriage as a source of grace and joy. But
when he thought of the sexual problem theologically, his strong
Paulinism prompted him to define marriage as "a hospital for

2$$ THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

sick souls," emphasizing with Paul the purely negative advan-
tages of a stable sexual partnership between man and woman.
It falls to recognize the fact that a community in which mutual
fidelity between husband and wife, and between parents and
children, disciplines life has a more positive contribution to
the achievement of grace than the mere channeling of sexual
passion. The errors of the Reformation thus frequently derive
from a lack of rigor in exploiting its own Biblical presupposi-
tions.

The truth which emerged in the Reformation was not de-
pendent upon a literalistic interpretation of Scripture. It was,
in fact, obscured by such interpretations For they reduced to
a miraculous historical fact, the fact of history which had to
be discerned by faith to be a disclosure of the divine judge-
ment and mercy, which would shatter the self in its self-esteem
and renew to a more creative life. Luther, in contrast to Calvin,
was not given to Bibliolatry but described the Bible as the
"cradle of Christ/' thus emphasizing the central revelation
which must be definitive for the Christian life. But it is fair
to say that the whole Reformation in both its Lutheran and
Calvinlstic varieties, was Biblicist in comparison with Ca-
tholicism. This was an inevitable consequence, on the one
hand, of Its polemic against the authority of the Church, which
could not be carried on without the undue exaltation of the
authority of a Book; and, on the other hand, it was due to the
indifference of the Reformation to the disciplines of culture,
to the scornful attitude of Luther toward "philosophy** and
to problems of ontology, which re-enacted the old Hebraic
indifference toward all speculations about the coherences and
essences of life, and particularly of nature. The resulting ob-
scurantism seemed to relegate Protestant faith to those por-
tions of the population which were not abreast of the phe-
nomenal developments in the various fields of culture and to
give it the appearance of a remnant left over from a pre-scien-
tific age. But it was not merely due to cultural backwardness.
That is proved by the quality of Neo-Reformation thought,
as in Karl Barth, for instance, which was able to combine a
sophisticated knowledge of all the disciplines of modern cul-

REASON AND NATURE IN DISINTEGRATION 109

ture with a frantic effort to isolate the Christian faith from
the allegedly debilitating effects of philosophical and scientific
speculations.

We must postpone for the moment the various honest and
heroic efforts made by what is usually defined as "liberal Chris-
tianity" to establish contact with modern culture, and need
only record now that these efforts did usually result in dissi-
pating a part of the Biblical heritage and giving a version of
the Christian faith which incorporated one or more of the
modern illusions about the self or the dramas of history. These
abortive efforts, together with the cultural obscurantism of
orthodox Protestantism, fully reveal that the problem of doing
justice to both the dramatic and the structural or ontological
aspects of human existence are as difficult now as when the
debate between Hebraism and Hellenism first began. How dif-
ficult it is may be gathered by a consideration of the rather
pathetic debate between modern science and Protestant ortho-
doxy on questions of human nature and destiny, initiated by
the Darwinian discoveries in biology. In that debate, Dar-
winianism seemed to crown the whole structure of modern
interpretations of a progressive history by proving natural
forms to be as subject to development as historical structures.
It also proved an historical relation between the human
"animal" and its "mammalian" forebears. These were all "sci-
entific" discoveries, consequent upon an empirical observation
of historical and natural sequences. Modern culture drew some
illicit, though seemingly plausible, conclusions about these
discoveries. It concluded that man's opinion of himself was
too optimistic and that he was no doubt a part of "nature."
It also concluded that history was but an extension of the
natural process so that evolution in biological forms was sup-
posed to give the final proof for modern man's confidence in
historical progress. Thus in the words of Glutton-Brock, "Sci-
ence told a lot of little truths in the interest of a great lie."
The great lie was the belief that human freedom was not real
and that man had no unique characteristics which would dis-
tinguish him markedly from the other animals. Orthodox
Protestantism countered this great lie by "telling a lot of little

22 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

lies In the interest of a great truth/' The truth was the unique
character of man; and the little lies were the pathetic efforts
to refute undoubted scientific discoveries about biological evo-
lution by illicit appeals to the Biblical doctrine of creation,
as if it were an alternative to scientific analysis of causes rather
than a reference to the mystery which lies beyond all causal
sequences and prompts reverence for the emergence of any
novelty in the temporal flux, particularly the emergence of
such a novelty as the human being. This controversy was in a
sense the pathetic climax of the long warfare between science
and religion and seemed to prove that the warfare had finally
ended in the complete victory of science over religion. All that
had been accomplished, however, was to give a modern nat-
uralistic version of ontological structure a spurious triumph
over the "empirical" reality which can be attested by any
honest "experience." That reality is the significant freedom of
man expressing itself not only above the level of nature but
above any conceiv&ble, QjU^Qgical. level whatsoever^-an<i able
by that freedom to elaborate various dramatic patterns of
history.

There can be no question about the futility of the effort to
guard the idea of the uniqueness of the human person by re-
sisting and defying the evidence of the biological scientists
in regard to the evolution of natural forms. This is the more
true since it is an accepted fact and truth that man is related
to the natural order and is therefore in a sense an animal. But
it is also true that Darwinian conclusions did materially influ-
ence the modern estimate of man's nature so that it seemed im-
possible to conceive of man as a unique creature. This fact has
persuaded a modern philosopher, Karl Jaspers, that it is neces-
sary provisionally to question the validity of the evolutionary
idea of the emergence of man at a particular point in the
evolutionary development in order to get a hearing from mod-
ern men about the thesis of the radical difference between
man and the other creatures. In other words, a justified em-
piricism in regard to the natural order may become so dom-
inated by ontological (in this case, naturalistic) presupposi-
tions that it becomes impossible to be genuinely empirical

REASON AND NATURE IN DISINTEGRATION 111

about facts of a different order which do not fit into the onto-
logical presuppositions. 1

The fact that Christian obscurantism actually sought to
guard an important "fact" about man, though with an abortive
strategy, does not excuse the cultural obscurantism, the indif-
ference to the task of tracing the causal relations in nature or
in history. But it does prove that the History of the Warfare
between Science and Religion (Andrew White) was not so
simply the story of the triumph of science over religion as was
generally supposed. It was certainly not a simple triumph of
truth over error and superstition. A system of thought which
was based upon a justified "fideism" and which became cor-
rupted by an unjustified obscurantism did possess some true
insights into the nature of man and his history. On the other
hand, a scientific and rationalistic culture was blind to some
obvious, not to say obtrusive, facts about the dimensions of
selfhood and of history. Its prescriptions of inquiry contained
some hidden ontological dogmas which blinded the culture to
tlwiscJ^^ -withit& dogmas,

We must postpone for a moment a consideration of the long
and tortuous process through which the culture of a free
society winnowed the truth about the self and its dramas, con-
tained in a Biblical faith, from the errors caused by its cul-
tural obscurantism and at the same time extricated itself from
the errors due to an uncritical reliance upon reason and the
scientific method. For these dogmas betrayed it into the effort
to comprehend history within the dimension of nature and
to derive virtue from man's reason. The political history of the
Western world achieved triumphs of freedom and justice by
winnowing truth from falsehood in both forms of faith.

i Karl Jaspers, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy. "Man can not be
derived from something else ... to be aware of this signifies man's
freedom, which is lost in every other total determination of his being
... All empirical causalities and biological processes of development
would seem to apply to man's material substratum and not to himself,"
p. 59.

Chapter \ J

UNDERSTANDING NATURE AND MIS-
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN NATURE

Reformation restored the Biblical-dramatic
modes of thought and reclaimed knowledge of those aspects of
human nature which were obscured by either the classical-
medieval ontology or the classical identification of the self with
its mind.

The Renaissance separated out the classical elements from
the medieval synthesis. It therefore initiated all those forces
and tendencies in modern thought which either equated mind
with self and derived virtue from reason, or which tried to
understand the self in the context of some ontological frame-
work. Naturally the Renaissance also restored the capacities
for rational discrimination which characterized a classical
culture and which, expanded by modern scientific technics,
have contributed so much to the modern man's understanding
of his world and of himself within the limits of the culture's
dogmas. However, the modern movement developed two char-
acteristics which were not anticipated in the classical world
view. The first is the idea of a temporal development of both
nature and history. This progressive~view had its" rise "in "the 1
^I55Ism^ "expgcTedh 'htiGiatti^restsou

to march to new triumphs, once reason escaped frpm the

112

UNDERSTANDING NATURE MISUNDERSTANDING HUMAN NATURE 113

prison house of ecclesiastical authority. This optimism was
fed by a multitude of real and spurious causes until it became
the dominant principle of interpretation for the understand-
ing of both nature and human nature. The discovery of the
growth of historical forms, implied in the thought of the
Roman Lucretius but not able to break through the cyclical
dogma of the classical age, gave a great impetus to the idea of
progress. It turned the cycles into spirals in early Renaissance
historiography, thus transmuting the classical into the modern
view of historical reality. The discovery of the development
of historical forms was supplemented by the later discovery of
development in biological structures. Darwin's biology seemed
to provide the final key for the understanding of the world.
It also accentuated a second characteristic of modern cul-
ture, not evident in the classical world-view which it ostensibly
restored. That was the interest in nature and the consequent
or at least "ancillary ' con victionYhat nature as a system is the
ultimate reality to which man must orient himself. A natural-
istic ontology was a subordinate element"" "in classical "culture,
fiut Plato and Aristotle triumphed over the early naturalists
or "atomists/* and naturalism never became a serious option
for men throughout the history of Western culture until th6
phenomenal triumphs of modern science and its conquest of
nature seemed to make it plausible, ^^nj^^jinderstopd a$
^m^^hus modern culture marched inexorably
the"tm3erstanding of nature and the misunderstanding
of man. For it not only tried to contain human freedom within
an ontological framework but it conceived that framework in
naturalistic terms, which is to say, in terms which denied the
freedom of the self and falsified the drama of history more con-
sistently than any other ontology. A special ironic touch is
given to this development by the fact that it was partly due
to the "empirical" method of modern science which was in-
tended to ascertain the "facts" by careful observation and to
discount the "deductive" method which was based on con-
fidence in the strict rationality of reality and upon the con-
sequent validity of proceeding from the known to the un-
known by rational deduction.

224 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

In the words of Francis Bacon, the father of modern em-
piricism: "Our method is continually to dwell on things so-
berly ... to establish forever a true and legitimate union
between the experimental and the rational faculty. . . . Those
therefore who are determined, not to conjecture or guess, but
to find out and know, not to invent fables and romances of
the world, but to look and dissect the nature of the real world
must consult only things themselves." x This empirical ambi-
tion, which is responsible for all the triumphs of the natural
sciences, was directed equally by Bacon and his followers
against both the Aristotelian rationalism and the Christian
authoritarianism in the medieval synthesis. It gave modern
culture a special animus against "dogma." But unfortunately
it was not prepared to deal with the hidden dogmas in the
prescriptions of science itself. It was therefore not prepared
for the illusions which spread in the name of "empiricism."
It is important to consult the evidence of "things themselves."
But inquiries can not be undertaken without presuppositions
or what President Conant defines as "conceptual schemes."
These conceptual schemes are the hidden dogmas. They are
usually the more potent for being implicit rather than explicit.
"Science/' declares President Conant, "is an interconnected
series of concepts and conceptual schemes, which have devel-
oped as a result of observation and experimentation, and are
fruitful of further experimentation and observation." 2

Conant's regard for the necessity of "conceptual schemes"
reveals the impossibility of observing the "things themselves"
without a frame of meaning for the inquiry. Among natural
scientists these conceptual schemes are assumed to be limited
and to be subject to constant re-examination in the light of
empirical evidence; for empirical observation may prove the
tentative conceptual scheme to be at variance with the facts.
Thus the first empirical science of the modern period, astron-
omy, invalidated the conceptual scheme underlying Ptolemaic
and Aristotelian astronomy by the evidence of facts which
pointed to a different astronomical order than had been as-

1 Francis Bacon: Preface to De Augmentis, pp. 6-16

2 James B. Conant: Science and Common Sense, p. 25.

UNDERSTANDING NATURE MISUNDERSTANDING HUMAN NATURE 115

sumed in the older pre-Copernican astronomy. From that day
to this, it has been assumed that it is a fairly simple procedure
to change conceptual schemes when the evidence of the "facts"
discredits them. But an "empirical" culture was not prepared
to deal with the problem of wide, rather than specific, con-
ceptual schemes, that is, with presuppositions of inquiry which
referred not to a specific type of being under scrutiny, but
with the very character of being itself. Ideally these conceptual
schemes were subject to re-exammation; but practically they
proved themselves powerful enough to determine the evidence
by which they were supposed to be tested. Thus Professor John
Dewey, the most typical of modern naturalistic philosophers,
never tired of insisting that the "experimental method" must
be rigorous enough to re-examine its own hypotheses. But it
never occurred to him that his insistence that the "methods of
science" could be transferred from the field of nature to that
of history, and that only the intrusion of irrelevant religious
and political authority prevented this consummation, rested
upon an erroneous and, unexamined presupposition. That was
the uniyersajly held ^belief of modern culture that .tHeTrTalm
of history was essentially identical with the realm of nature.
THis belief reduced history to the realm of necessity, and QJb-
scured the freedom of man and the reality of the drama oi
history, *

Two figures dominated the thought of the seventeenth cen-
tury and contrived between them in their diverse ways to
develop Renaissance thought in the direction which finally
resulted in modern culture. They were Thomas Hobbes and
Rene Descartes. They had quite different views of human na-
ture but both contrived to sow the seeds which flowered in
later confusion about the character of the human self.

Thomas Hobbes did not share the confidence of modernity
in "reason" as the source of human virtue. In that respect he
was not typically modern. His realism, not to say cynicism,
probably established the difference between the realism of our
political sciences in contrast to the more prevalent illusions
about human nature in social sciences. "Reason" in Hobbes'
esteem was the servant of the egoistic self. It was not there-

21 6 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

fore, as for all rationalists, the instrument of justice and the
guarantor of universal, as contrasted with partial and paro-
chial, values. It was "reason" which made the difference be-
tween the harmonies of nature and the competitions within
the human community. For reason was responsible for the
Inordinancy of all human desires. It justified men in following
their interests with a consistency which made conflict with
their fellow men inevitable and necessitated a tyrannical gov-
ernment in the interest of social harmony. We must postpone
for the moment a consideration of the relation of realism with
political conservatism in Hobbes, which has persuaded all
typical children of the Enlightenment that it is necessary to
encourage at least mild illusions about human nature for the
purpose of validating democracy. Our present concern is with
Hobbes' empiricism, and with the ancillary naturalism, not to
say, "materialism" in his thought. Hobbes was more rigorous
than any eighteenth-century French materialist in reducing
reality to corporeal dimensions and in dismissing every other
type of reality as "fantasy/ 1 He declares: "That a 'man is a
living body/ we mean not that 'man' is one thing and 'living
body' another thing and *is' or 'being* a third; but that 'man*
and 'living body' are the same thing . . . the consequence 'if
he be a man he is a living body* is a true consequence, signified
by the word 'is' . . . Therefore 'to walk/ 'to be speaking/
'to see'; also 'walking/ 'speaking/ 'sight/ life' and the like
signify just the same and are the names of nothing/' 3

Hobbes' polemic against "fantasies" includes every kind of
abstract concept or generalization which describes any "fact"
of nature and history above the level of sense object, or dis-
crete event. It fully reveals the ontological implications of a
rigorous empiricism. Naturally every aspect of selfhood beyond
the dimension of the "living body" is excluded from his sys-
tem. So, too, are all historic generalizations which describe
some pattern of history.

Descartes, the other and greater figure in the thought of the
seventeenth century, was very conscious of that dimension of

3 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, Chapter 6.

UNDERSTANDING NATURE MISUNDERSTANDING HUMAN NATURE 117

selfhood which rose above Hobbes' "living body." But he was
as concerned as was Hobbes to banish religious fancies and
credulities from the realm of knowledge. This he did by rigor-
ously separating the mind from the body, assuming that the
depth of selfhood which was not contained in a mechanically
conceived body would be described in the definition of "res
cogitans." His "Cogito ergo sum" is obviously indebted to
Augustine's speculations about the certainty of self-knowledge.
But the sum of Descartes' thought comes out at a refurbishing
of Aristotelian rationalism, in contrast to Hobbes' rigorous
anti-Aristotelianism. In his Passions of the Soul 4 in which he
distinguishes the passions which have their origin in "animal
spirits" and those which are subject to the mind, he reveals
the difficulty of destroying the idea of the unity of the self,
inherited from Hebraic-Christian culture so that the mind may
be fitted into a system of rational coherence and the body take
its place in a mechanically conceived "nature."

Naturally there is little more awareness of an integral self-
hood than in Hobbes, and the type of knowledge which
Descartes insists upon for the sake of certainty, as contrasted
with credulous imaginings, could not grasp historical realities
any more than Hobbes' empiricism. Descartes however was
typical and generative of two characteristics of modern culture.
His passion for exact knowledge laid the foundation for the
achievements of modern science; and his confidence in the
mind's control over "passions" restored the classical idea of
reason as a source of virtue. "Even those who have the weakest
souls," he declares, "can acquire a very absolute empire over
their passions, provided they employ sufficient skill in the
management and guidance of them." 5

The French Enlightenment managed to forget Hobbes' real-
istic account of human self-interest, to adopt his materialism
and to compound it with Cartesian rationalism. The result was
a fanaticism in the name of "reason" and of "nature," which
was to offer indubitable proof that the worship of "reason" as
the source of virtue and of order both within the individual

4 See Norman Kemp Smith: Descartes' Philosophical Writings, p. 285.
s Ibid, p. 305.

THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

and in the community was certainly not conducive to that
"reasonableness/ 5 which Montaigne extolled in skeptical re-
action to Catholic rationalism. Nothing in Western history
proves more conclusively that there is a great distinction be-
tween the use of reason for the sake of making discriminate
judgements and the worship of "reason" as the source of virtue.
Every error which infects a modern liberal culture in its esti-
mate of the human situation and most of the errors which
reached a tragic culmination in modern totalitarianism in the
name of "science" were hatched in the French Enlightenment.
History was simply equated with "nature" and regarded as
subject to "nature's laws/' These laws were regarded as fixed
and inviolable as anything in nature; and therefore subject to
"reason's" analysis. All the illusions of the type of social sci-
ence which would destroy ideological taints in historical judge-
ments by stricter scientific procedures, were anticipated in the
Enlightenment. It had no awareness of the self's capacity to
influence the mind or of the inability of any mind to give a
rationally compelling account of historical reality. Therefore
it equated "reason" and "nature" sometimes because it be-
lieved nature itself to be "rational*' and sometimes because it
believed it to be subject to the rational control of man. It was
only necessary for reason to discern the laws of nature to ac-
complish this object. This confusion led inter aha to the econ-
omy of the physiocrats, who not only believed that the knowl-
edge of the laws of nature would free men of all irrelevant
political control, but also that an enlightened despot might be
necessary to accomplish this emancipation. All these confusions
led to what has been defined as "totalitarian democracy/' 6
The irony of the fact that the worship of reason resulted in
Jacobin fanaticism and cruelty; and that a nation which
imagined itself emancipated from religious fanaticism should
fall so quickly into a new fanaticism, informed by a very
religious anti-religious rationalism, has not been fully ap-
preciated by all post-revolutionary "liberalism/' It still adheres
to absurd notions about the perfectability of man, chiefly of

C/ T. L. Talman: Totalitarian Democracy.

UNDERSTANDING NATURE MISUNDERSTANDING HUMAN NATURE 119

his reason. It refuses to admit the plain evidence of history,
that democracy is necessary because man's reason is corrupt,
that is, corrupted by his interests. Therefore it is not possible
to trust anyone with unchecked power or to allow any position
in the community to remain unchallenged. The Enlightenment
spawned every illusion which produced despotism in the name
of liberty, civil war in the name of fraternity, and supersti-
tious and uncritical politics in the name of reason. Thus
Gondorcet criticized the classical age for Its "empiricism," and
rejected Montesquieu's relativism as being based too much
on geographic factors and neglecting the immutable conditions
or "necessities" of human nature and the "rights" which wer^
allegedly derived from them. Probably no era in modern
history has been at once more insistent upon restoring the
credos of a classical rationalism, and more engulfed in con-
fusion about the nature of the human self and its dramas,
than the period of the French Revolution. That is, among
others, the reason why the promises of the French Revolution
remain unfulfilled in France to the present day. The unhappy
nation is still unable to find stability in the perpetual conflict
between social forces which are informed by contrasting ra-
tionalistic illusions. The one force rejects, and the other ac-
cepts, the doctrine of man's perfectability. The one regards
the Church, and the other holds reason, to be the fountain
of truth. But neither is capable of that charity and accommo-
dation to the other which makes community possible. So the
French Revolution remains unresolved in France after more
than a century of history. Evidently the abstract principles
of the "dignity" of man and of his right to "liberty" are not
as fruitful in creating a free society as the wisdom which rec-
ognizes the modicum of truth in error and the modicum of
error in the truth of every political credo, and as the sense
of community which overarches the political conflict in a
healthy society and robs it of its venom.

The nineteenth century added little to the wisdom of the
contrasting types of naturalists who both regarded history as
identical with the realm of nature, the one believing that men
should not interfere with its laws and the other seeing in

120 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

sociology the power of a "scientific" mastery of history by
man. Herbert Spencer was the proponent of the one theory
and Auguste Comte of the other. Darwinian biology gave rise
to a "social Darwinism" which seemed to give an added
scientific prestige to the physiocratic theory, with the differ-
ence however that men were warned against interference, not
with the "harmonies" of nature but with the "struggle for
survival." In America, William Graham Sumner was the most
prominent proponent of the theory of social Darwinism, warn-
ing that "the law of the survival of the fittest is not man-
made, and can not be abrogated by man." 7 Lester Ward, on
the other hand, propounded the philosophy, or rather sociol-
ogy, of Comte, with equally absurd conclusions. He was con-
vinced that a proper engagement of "disinterested intelligence
and scientific investigation" would enable "sociocracy" to
replace monarchy, aristocracy and plutocracy. This rule of
the "whole of the people/' to be distinguished from the
"majority of the people," which characterized conventional
democracy, would be made possible by the triumph of scientific
intelligence over all partial and parochial viewpoints. Both
Sumner and Ward abjured metaphysics. Yet it is apparent
that the "scientific method" played the same role as 'the "guar-
antor of the absolute as the Aristotelian nous. Modern em-
piricism, whether it regarded man as merely the creature or
as the creator of history, evidently understood little about
the endless competitions of interest in the drama of history
and the impossibility of resolving these conflicts by the ap-
plication of "disinterested intelligence/' In short, it had
learned nothing from the refutations by history of the illusions
of the French Enlightenment. Decades were required to de-
liver our social sciences from the naivetes of this new em-
piricism, so ignorant of the real character of the human self
and of the historical drama.

The idealistic reaction to the naturalism of the Enlighten-
ment in the nineteenth century supposedly cherished the
unique spiritual qualities of man in its "idealistic" ontology.

? William Graham Sumner: Sociology,

UNDERSTANDING NATURE MISUNDERSTANDING HUMAN NATURE 121

Hegel, particularly, dominated the thought of the nineteenth
century. He managed to create a very imposing system of
thought which combined elements of classical rationalism,
Christian piety and the modern idea of a progressive history.
Hegel's early writings reveal some awareness of what Kierke-
gaard defined later as the "existing individual"; his hopes, anx-
ieties and frustrations. Furthermore, a deposit of Biblical-
Christian awareness of selfhood, particularly of the unique-
ness of the self's self-consciousness, made it necessary for Hegel
to go through considerable "dialectical" legerdemain before
he could arrive at the identification of the self with its mind,
a procedure which was accomplished without much ado in
classical rationalism. The struggle within the self between its
self-centeredness and its desire to commit itself beyond itself
was transmuted into the tension between the self as particu-
lar object in nature and the self as subject and as poten-
tially universal mind. This was an intellectual task, which,
though difficult, offered no real difficulties to the intelligent
man who could disavow the Christian ideas of "sin" and of
"grace," as it attempted self-redemption by rising above the
"unhappy consciousness" of this tension to a serene attain-
ment of its universal validity. Of course the real self in its
organic unity of finiteness and freedom disappeared in this
procedure. Hegel regarded Biblical religion as merely a crude
and picturesque version of his scheme of redemption. He was
blind to the fact that its dramatic forms revealed truths
about the self and its history which would be obscured by a
rationalism which sought to identify the self with its mind
and to comprehend the drama of history in ontological terms.
Hegel's interpretation of history was even more imposing
and absurd than his interpretation of selfhood. His philosophy
of history was a grand theodicy in which he tried to justify
the ways of God to man, or in this case to endow the drama
with meaning from the standpoint of his faith in an ultimate.
His ultimate was a God who required time to achieve divinity
or to realize both the freedom and the order which are in the
nature of the ultimate. The concept of God, requiring time
to become truly God, thus combined Christian and modern

122 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

religious feelings. But the classical motif was added by the
fact that the impulse which created historical movement was
furnished by logic itself, so that history became a logical or
at least a rational process. Parmenides had been concerned,
at the dawn of Greek philosophical speculation, with the
logical impulse to posit the antithesis of a concept, so that, for
instance, the concept of "being" posited the concept of "non-
being." But Parmenides could not regard anything as "being"
which was touched by the flux of "becoming" in its passage
from "non-being" to "being." This passion for identifying
"being" with a fixed structure, so that temporal events are
cast into the category of "appearance" remains a permanent
characteristic of the metaphysical mind. An eminent English
philosopher of the nineteenth century, F. H. Bradley, living
in an age intent upon finding "reality" in the temporal flux,
could nevertheless insist that every aspect of reality, involved
in flux, is only "appearance," while "reality" can be affirmed
only of the fixed rational structure of existence. It was Hegel's
genius that he placed logic in the service of historical move-
ment. It was his idea that the motive power of the historical
flux was provided by the very tension between opposites of
which Parmenides spoke. This tension between being and
"non-being" was responsible for "becoming." But the force
of temporal events was not circular as in classic thought, ac-
cording to which all "motion" was created by the "coming
to be and passing away" of particular entities, as they actual-
ized their essential nature and then decayed. The temporal
flux was logical in a different way. It moved from "thesis"
through "antithesis," to a synthesis of opposites; which in turn
became a new thesis for another "dialectical" advance. Every-
thing, including God, the self and man's history was driven
by this dialectic motive power. Thus all of reality including
history was thoroughly "rational."

It was an imposing structure of thought which had a few,
but only a few, "empirical" facts to support it; among these
were the distinction between nature as a realm of necessity
and history as a realm in which freedom and necessity were
compounded. There was also the tension between freedom

UNDERSTANDING NATURE MISUNDERSTANDING HUMAN NATURE 123

and order in the life of cultures which Hegel used to con-
struct a dialectical movement in history, beginning with prim-
itive life, moving through the ancient empires and culminating
in the perfect synthesis of the European (more particularly
Prussian) synthesis of order and freedom of his day. There
were some facts to give plausibility to the picture. But Hegel
falsified or obscured every dramatic pattern and reality of
history in order to preserve the unity and consistency of his
picture of the world, the self and history. The real cause
for its seeming plausibility was the modern man's faith in
consistency or coherence as a test of truth. He was willing
to deny the reality of a "living God," that is, of a God who
was more than a dialectical process, and the reality of his
own selfhood and the dramatic realities of his history, if only
he could believe this vision of an absolute which incorporated
time and history within it.

So imposing was the structure that for a century it was
possible to make only such portions of the Christian faith
acceptable to the "intellectuals'* as could be fitted into the
Hegelian world picture or could plausibly be reinterpreted in
terms of its outline. This was the triumph of the "rational"
element in the Greek inheritance over the experimental mod-
ern element which Francis Bacon desired to compound with
it. There were not however enough "facts" to support this
structure. It was a great inflated balloon waiting for someone
to puncture it.

Feuerbach proceeded to supply the puncture, whereupon a
swarm of "left wing" Hegelians tore up and redesigned the
whole conception un.til Marx came up with a grand redesign.
He managed to wed the materialism of the French Enlighten-
ment to the Hegelian "dialectic." Marx gave his philosophy
a seeming relevance and social motive power by a dash o
religious apocalypse dressed in the new "logic of history." Ac-
cording to Marx, the Hegelian speculations could be dismissed
as irrelevant except at one point. What "evidence" could sup-
port them? But was there not historical evidence for a "dia-
lectic" in man's social history? Did not history begin with an
original communal wholeness of man which represented his

124 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

true "essence"? Did not his primitive innocency disappear in
the antithesis of a "class society" in which man was "alienated"
from his "true essence'? Did not this class society then pro-
ceed through various chapters of feudalism and bourgeois
society until its "contradictions" reached a "climax" in modern
capitalism? Did not the injustices of this capitalism produce
a disinherited class whose resentment would provide the anti-
thetical thrust against it? All that was necessary was to instruct
the class of the disinherited, the "proletariat," what the logic
of history was, and that it had been marked out by that logic
to accomplish the heroic task of not only emancipating men
from injustice, but of changing the whole human situation so
that man is no longer creature and creator in history but
becomes unambiguously its master, not only "proposing but
disposing." Every religious reverence for the mystery of history
or of life is thereupon abolished as no more than an outmoded
remnant of a previous impotence.

It is not surprising that this version of Hegelian logic
should have become plausible enough to become the basis
of a new world religion; and one which fills the world with
cruelty and with pretensions of world dominion in the name
of world redemption. Instead of being involved in ambivalence
between visions of an absolute God beyond the conditions of
time and the impulse to conform the conditions of time to the
vision of the absolute, it gives itself to the unambivalent
ambition to bring every historic reality under the dominion
of its vision, forgetting, of course* that all such visions are
partial anci parochial, and that they are therefore the source
of evil in the application. The new religion harnessed the
resentnients to the hopes of the disinherited and gave them
the pride of believing themselves prospective world eman-
cipators. Furthermore, it wedded the rationalistic passion with
the empirical interest so that it could pose as a "science," the
"Marxist-Leninist science" in modern communist parlance.
Furthermore, it gave a group of intellectual idealists the
chance to compound their idealism with their lust for power.
They had to instruct the proletariat, ostensibly the saviors
of the world, but unconscious of their destiny until instructed.

UNDERSTANDING NATURE MISUNDERSTANDING HUMAN NATURE

Thus it provided the opportunity for secular prophets to be-
come the atheistic theocrats or priest-kings of a Utopian state.
They could fulfill every unfulfilled dream and ambition of the
eighteenth-century philosophers. The vision was so attractive
that it held many intellectuals bound long after history had
proved that this dream had turned into a nightmare of
cruelty.

A footnote must be added about the discredit to the cult
of "reason" involved in this tragic history. The communist
tyranny had been preceded by the fascist one. The fascists
were corrupt romantics, trusting in their intuitions and in the
glorification of the sub-rational vitalities of life, of "Blut
und Boden." Hence the devotees of the cult of reason warned
the world about the danger of lack of confidence in reason.
They conceded that reason might be, on occasion, weak or
corrupt. But was it not better to cherish reason, they argued,
than to succumb to the flood of unreason? They were right,
of course, in emphasizing the creative function of rational
discrimination. But they have not yet made their arguments
relevant to the historic fact that communism has proved the
cult of unreason not to be the sole source of tyranny. The other
is an uncritical cult of reason, which manages to derive cruelty
and tyranny from its scientific pretensions, thus proving how
unreasonable a pretentious reason can be. We have two lessons
in the limits and the corruptions of man's reason, one in the
French Revolution and one in modern communism. The latter
is not "irrational" in the same sense as the Nazis were. It
surveys the world with cool calculation. But it may bring a
final disaster upon the world because its cool calculations
are founded upon, or informed by, wholly illusory ideas of a
"logic of history." How can we prove that this "reason" is
irrational? We could of course prove that the presuppositions
of inquiry are very important; that they may obscure the facts
which the inquiry is supposed to ascertain; that they are, in
fact, rather like all the implicit dogmas of modern men, who
may pride themselves upon their freedom from explicit dogma,
The communist dogmas are rather more restrictive than some
other dogmas; and have proved to be so even when they are

226 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

not supported by a police power which suppresses incon-
venient evidence in conflict with them.

Fortunately, the drama of history was more unpredictable
and its facts less "logical" than either Hegel or Marx had
believed. Therein lay the salvation of Western civilization, at
least Its avoidance of the prison which Marx's logic (as
amended by Lenin) had prepared for it. The class structure
of a technical civilization became ever more complex rather
than more simple. The government proved not to be simply
the "executive committee" of the "ruling classes" as the theory
averred. In fact, economic power was not as superior to
political power as both classical liberalism and Marxism
thought. The free societies possessed more resources for react-
ing to injustice and for adjusting the disbalances of power
which created them. The most advanced "capitalistic" na-
tional community, far from subjecting its industrial workers
to the logic of "increasing misery," actually allowed them to
share a fabulous prosperity, which was indeed subject to seri-
ous fluctuations, but which increased rather than gave promise
of moving toward a catastrophic climax. Most of these "facts/'
which refuted the Marxist logic, were so obvious that they
could not be denied. They changed the social and political
history of the Western world into a destiny such as no Marxist
had anticipated. Perhaps this proves that empirically ascer-
tained facts have the power to refute even the most plausible
dogma. On the other hand, a modicum of facts is able to
sustain the prestige of even an implausible dogma. Consider,
for instance, the prestige of the Marxist faith in that part of
the world in which a decaying feudalism and the remnants
of "imperialism" produce enough facts to sustain the dogma
which has been refuted by obvious facts in the technical civili-
zation for which it was designed and where its logical promises
were hoped to be fulfilled. In addition, the two countries of
the Western world in which it still has prestige either have not
completely overcome a traditional feudalism (Italy) ; or have
a tired and corrupt capitalism (France) which produces some
of the facts which seem to validate the Marxist dogma.

Chapter f g

THE CLIMAX OF AN EMPIRICAL
CULTURE: ITS BLINDNESS TO SOME
OBVIOUS "FACTS"

JL ortunately, the larger part of Western civiliza-
tion was able to refute the logic and pseudo-empiricism of
Marxism by developing a common life in which both freedom
and justice were preserved, and in which the resentments
of the poor did not prompt rebellion against its institutions.
It is the fond illusion of a modern liberal culture that it van-
quished this pseudo-empiricism by a more genuine empiricism
which was thoroughly "scientific" and not quasi-philosophical
and quasi-religious. Actually the wrong theory of Marxism
was refuted by social and political facts, which were not in-
tended by any of the various contestants in the cultural and
political contests. To this development we must devote our
concluding chapters. In this context it is important to observe
that the "empirical" emphasis in the culture of the West con-
tains almost as many hidden dogmas as the empiricism of
Marxism. Furthermore, these dogmas make our historical
sciences blind to some obvious facts about human nature and
history which simpler cultures apprehended by the wisdom
of common sense. But the empirical method has been so suc-
cessful in the understanding of nature that the prestige of the
triumphs of the natural sciences could always be used to

127

128 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

obscure or deny the obvious deficiencies in the understanding
of man. Thus modern culture has moved toward an ironic
climax of misunderstanding man by the same alleged methods
which helped it to understand nature, and to cover up the
significant failure in one field b\ a phenomenal success in
another.

If we make the charge that an empirical culture is blind to
some very obvious "facts/' it is necessary to define what is
meant by "facts." We have seen that Hobbes could recognize
only corporeal realities as "facts." Traditional scientific em-
piricism recognizes only sense data as facts. But who would
deny the validity of the concept of "fact" to such "realities"
as the self s freedom, the self-corruption of that freedom in
self-concern, or the self's "historical" character? These are the
kind of facts with which the average man must deal daily.

(A) Common sense attests the reality of each one of these
facts. When we say "the self's freedom," this "fact" is inter-
preted In common-sense terms as the self's ability to deter-
mine its actions, despite the determining influences upon
those actions in the environment, and despite the possible
inhibiting forces in its own "sub-rational" nature upon the
power of its will. Its freedom is never absolute; but the com-
mon sense of all the ages, free of metaphysical subtleties, has
agreed to define this freedom in terms of holding the self
responsible for its actions. Despite all modern scientific or
metaphysical deterministic theories, the jurisprudence of the
world has never varied in assuming a responsible freedom of
the self, though "insanity" may be recognized by law as lim-
iting responsibility; and presumably psychopathological de-
rangements, short of insanity, might be recognized as limiting
responsibility, if not in law then certainly in popular opinion.
Furthermore, a charitable survey of the determining influences
upon the life and actions of a delinquent child, for instance,
will qualify the severity with which responsibility is appor-
tioned. But these qualifications do not seriously challenge the
general assumption that the self is in possession of a respon-
sible freedom.

THE CLIMAX OF AN EMPIRICAL CULTURE 129

It Is not only common sense and jurisprudence but the art
of every culture which attest to this capacity o the self, for self-
determination. The novels and dramas of every age have
based their depiction of characters upon the assumption that
human beings have the capacity of self-determination. Any
other assumption would destroy art as surely as it would dis-
tort the realities with which the common man feels himself
to be in touch.

This free and responsible self is either denied or obscured
in the prevailing theories of the psychological and social sci-
ences of our day. Sometimes the strict naturalistic presupposi-
tions obscure the reality to which common experience attests.
Sometimes the methods of empirical science, drawn from the
natural sciences, serve to obscure the facts about the self which
can be known only through introspection and in dramatic
encounter. Thus disciplines which have ostensibly disavowed
all metaphysics are as unable as the more rigorously meta-
physical disciplines to see the responsible self and its involve-
ment in sin or its capacity for grace.

The thought of an eminent psychologist, who is not gov-
erned by strictly naturalistic presuppositions, reveals how the
methods of the natural sciences, applied to human realities,
obscure the real self in its integrity and freedom. After ana-
lyzing all the intricacies of human personality, Gardner Mur-
phy asks the question: "Should the student of personality,
at the present stage of research, posit a non-empirical entity,
distinct from both organism and its perceptual responses to
forms and symbols, which are called a "self"? He decides that
"a tentatively negative answer to this question seems ad-
visable." a Mr. Murphy is too much of a realist to give more
than a "tentatively negative" answer. ^^^^g^t^dards ^oi
his science will not permit any but a negative answer, thoujgh^
i^^rbmis^s^tfiaranotKer answer < ttS^t' 4 V^v^n^ien "the
jjresen^ no ad-

vance in the inquiry will ever enaBM 'hif Type" of empiricism

* Gardner Murphy. Personality, Harper & Biothers, p 490.

THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

to find the free and responsible self. It may be known in
introspection and in dramatic encounter but not by methods
of empiricism which make the self an "object" of empirical
inquiry. It is a * 'non-empirical entity" only in the sense that
it can not be seen through the spectacles of an empiricism,
derived from the natural sciences. It is of course not distinct
from either its "organism" or its "perceptual responses/' i.e.,
its mind; but neither can it be equated with either.

It is rather significant that this self, which Mr. Murphy
can not find, is the same self upon which Descartes rests his
final certainty in his famous dictum cogito, ergo sum, though
it must be admitted that the self was obscured as quickly as
discovered by Descartes' definition of this self as res cogitans,
as the thinking thing. Jrj.e various versions of depth psy-
chology seem involved % in the contradiction of impfying^the
responsible self in some facets of their thought while .ttxey
explicitly deny its reality in other facets.

Freudianism explicitly denies the free self because it is so
impressed by the power of the various sub-rational compul-
sions which destroy its freedom. It regards the emancipation
of the self from both subrational and social compulsions as
the object of therapy: "Where the id is there let the ego be"
is the Freudian slogan. But the reality of a real ego is by no
means unambiguously acknowledged. Freud was, of course,
aware (as aware as Samuel Johnson) of the introspective tes-
timony to the reality of free will. But he regarded this testi-
mony as a "subjective feeling" which had no legitimacy beside
the scientific evidence, which related every action to a previous
cause. He was thus able to deny the reality of the real self
more simply than Hegel, who had to engage in considerable
dialectic subtlety before he transmuted the self into mind or
"understanding." Freud is reluctant to use the word "soul,"
probably because of the connotation of immortality which
adheres to that word. But he is forced to reintroduce the
banished word in terms of its Greek equivalent psyche. Fur-
thermore, the banished freedom and responsibility are in-
advertently acknowledged when a Freudian psychiatrist insists

THE CLIMAX OF AN EMPIRICAL CULTURE 131

on the necessity of voluntary rather than compulsory submis-
sion to therapy. (The co-operation of the unacknowledged
self is important.) Sometimes a warning is issued against the
inclination of the unacknowledged self to use the technics
and insights of psychiatry for purposes of self-deception or
self-j us tification. 2

The self is obscured in modern anthropological theory,
even when extreme (mechanistic) forms of naturalism are
disavowed. Thus Kluckhohn and Murray attribute the "ex-
treme position of nineteenth century mechanism" to the
reaction of modern psychology to their possessive mother,
philosophy, and their dogmatic grandfather, theology. But
the consistency of their own naturalism and the consequent
obscuring of the free self, is evident in their conclusion that,
"Personality must be located in nature, within some field where
there is togetherness of all these processes or of representa-
tions of these processes. . . . Thus we can state that person-
ality is the organization of all the integrative processes in
the brain." 3

It is significantly the "brain" rather than "mind" which
is defined as the source of the organization of integrative
processes. Either the problem of the correlation between brain
and mind, which has exercised the philosophers, has not been
considered, or, having been considered, the "mind" was dis-
missed as not belonging to, or being located in, "nature."

When Neo-Freudians try to correct Freud's lack of under-
standing for the self's dependence upon others and elaborate
a "cultural psychology" which emphasizes the dependence on
the self for its security and self-esteem, upon the love and the
esteem of others, particularly the "mothering one," they only
contrive to obscure the freedom of the self more absolutely,

2L. F. Shaffer: Psychology of Adjustment, p. 534.

s Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry A. Murray: Personality in Nature, So-
ciety and Culture, pp. 8-9. Quoted by Albert C. Outler in Psychotherapy
and the Christian Message. His chapter on "The Human Self and Its
Freedom" deals with the blindness of psychiatric theory to the realities
of the responsible self.

132 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

for they regard it as merely the product of its immediate social
environment, particularly in. its infancy. 4

The "objective" psychologists are frequently as incapable
of discerning a real self as the psychiatrists. They are even
more ready to propose schemes for "conditioning" persons for
"socially approved" ends and are vague about the criteria
which determine the legitimacy of these ends. Thus a psycholo-
gist 5 projects a psychologist's vision of Utopia in terms which
betray both a lack of humor and any social wisdom. He would
establish ideal communities, preferably not too large lest the
passions and complexities of the larger community corrupt
the ideal harmony of the "conditioned" community. In these
communities men would be conditioned from childhood to
live in frictionless harmony with their fellows. This harmony
is made possible because the individuals have been purged
of all jealousies and egoistic ambitions which would set them
at variance with their fellows. They are significantly without
any trace of dignity and nobility as well as of jealousy or
competitive impulses. These conditioned persons of the psy-
chological Utopia are obviously not real selves, and are bereft
of the indeterminate possibilities of good and evil, charac-
teristic of free selves.

Modern anthropology has lately developed a theory of cul-
tural relativism 6 which makes the individual completely the
:reature of his culture. They have not resolved the problem
with which Socrates challenged the Sophists and have not
enlightened us why it should be possible to learn anything
about man in general, if men are completely relativized by
their particular culture. They have hit upon an important
truth in recognizing the historical character of man; but the
rigor of their cultural determinism has made them blind
to the freedom of man over the culture of which he is obvi-
ously, in one sense, a creature.

4 C/. Harry Stack Sullivan: Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry, The
William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation, 1947.
s C/. B. F. Skinner: Walden Two
e Cf. Ruth Benedict: Patterns of Culture.

THE CLIMAX OF AN EMPIRICAL CULTURE

"In the man-culture system," the anthropologist, Leslie
White, informs us, "man is the dependent, and culture the
independent variable/' Mr. White is certain that man's de-
pendence upon his culture makes it impossible for men to
solve such conflicts as the present one between the free and
the collectivist societies. He compares all efforts to guide his-
torical destiny with the efforts of primitive magic workers to
control the weather. Every significant difference between the
realm of history and the realm of nature is obscured in the
rigor of his determinism. "Why is it," he asks with incredible
naivete, "that if one employs the principle of cause and effect
in physical phenomena, no one cries 'fatalism'; but the mo-
ment one employs the principle in cultural phenomena the
accusation springs forth?" 7 Mr. White has evidently never
considered the historical complexities which arise from the
ambiguity of man as both the creator and the creature of
the cultural process; nor asked himself the question why
human cultures should ever have arisen and become distin^
guished from the animal society.

(B) In addition to the contradiction between the wisdom
of common sense and that of the academic empiricists on the
question of the freedom and responsibility of the self, there
is another contradiction between the two in the awareness
of the one and the blindness of the other to the curious
mixtures of egoism and creativity in human selves, manifesting
itself on all levels of behavior. Since the eighteenth century
there has been a good deal of speculation on the relation be-
tween "egoism" and "altruism," and about the elimination of
the one in favor of the other. But the mixture of the self's
concern with itself and its creative and responsible interests
is infinitely varied. Children in their relation to their parents,
soldiers dealing with their officers, workmen and office people
seeking tolerable relations with their superiors, develop an
almost instinctive method of appealing, on the one hand, to
the sympathies of those who have greater power than they

7 Leslie White: Science ayid Culture, p. 343.

134 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

and, on the other hand, trying to satisfy the vanity or pride,
the sense of power or the sense of importance of their su-
periors. The taint of egoism, both individual and collective,
Is taken for granted by all men of affairs In government and
business.

Common-sense wisdom also takes the infinite variety of the
compounds of self-concern with creative energy for granted and
is not surprised to find it on the highest as well as the lowest
levels of character. Even the most perfectionist Christian sects
and the most ascetic Christian monastics have practical ways
of dealing with the vanities and jealousies of their bishops
and abbots, which, according to their theories, are not sup-
posed to be tainted with this corruption. The pervasiveness
of egocentricity is observed by a modern poet, E. E. Cum-
mings, who wisely does not seek to distinguish between harm-
less and harmful versions of it in bearing testimony to Its
universality. "Who, if I may be so inconsiderate to ask, is not
egocentric?" asks Mr. Cummings. 8 "Half a century of time
and several continents of space in addition to a healthily devel-
oped curiosity, haven't enabled me to locate a single peripher-
ally situated ego. . . . My slight acquaintance with pick-
pockets and scientists leads me to believe that they are far
from being unselfcentered. ... So, I believe, are all honest
educators. And so, I am convinced, are streetcleaners and deaf
mutes, mothers, murderers, mountain climbers, cannibals,
fairies, strong men, beautiful women, unborn babes, interna-
tional spies, ghostwriters, bums, executives, out and out nuts,
cranks, dopefiends, altruists (above all) , obstetricians, ambu-
lance chasers, and lion tamers."

Mr, Cummings' list is interesting primarily because of its
calculated lack of discrimination. Only one of his categories
could be safely challenged; that of "unborn babes."

The effort to discriminate between "harmless" and ^harm-
ful" types of egotism would probably lead to endless and
inconclusive debates. It is fairly easy to refute the contention

$E. E. Cummings: Six Nonlectures f Harvard University Press.

THE CLIMAX OF AN EMPIRICAL CULTURE 135

that egoistic ambition is a necessary prerequisite of creativity;
but it is obvious that egoism is a fairly universal concomitant
of creative efforts of all types. Sometimes it militates against
the person's usefulness; but at other times it Is a harmless
excrescence. Artists are generally assumed to be "tempera-
mental," which is to say, vain. Their vanity usually feeds on
their success. But only in extreme cases does it seriously affect
their art. Eloquent preachers are under the same temptation
as artists, and succumb to the temptation as frequently. Men
of power are corrupted by the love of power and by pride in
its possession. Powerless idealists, on the other hand, frequently
reveal a great concern for their reputation as Idealists; and
scholars are jealous of each other because of possible Inequali-
ties of academic prestige. It Is one of the mysteries of common-
sense reaction to this universal tendency that no one can define
at what point egocentric! ty ceases to be a harmless foible and
becomes a harmful vice. Yet there is a fairly consistent reac-
tion which distinguishes the harmless from the vexatious
egotism. Soldiers are wont to discount the human foibles of
their commanders with gentle cynicism, but beyond a certain
undefined point they react with hatred to this egotism. Politi-
cians are expected to be ambitious; and their ambition for
personal advancement is not believed to militate against their
capacity to serve the commonweal. Yet there is an undefined
point which the politician must not exceed if the public Is
|iot to react cynically to his ambitions.

j Common sense, in short, takes human egotism for granted
n all forms of , r human relations, and reacts wltti gentle or
larsh cynicism to it according to its degree, its' vexatiousness
pid qs^ib]y b ^CQrdiQ^4a4h^degee^ of self-deceptionJn^jJie
ritic. For the illusion of freedom from a universal taint is
f erylcbmmon and is productive of resentful reactions to the
egotism of others. The wisdom of the "man in the street"
never fails to comprehend the mixture of creativity and self-
concern in the behavior of all his fellows. This is the achieve-
ment of a genuine non-academic "empiricism."
In contrast, the academic wisdom deals abstractly with this

136 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

mixture of motives in human behavior. The wisest under-
standing of the complexities is characteristic of those dis-
ciplines which are most genuinely related to the historical
studies and those which pride themselves least on their
empiricism.

The discipline of economics was cradled in a physiocratic
theory which assumed both the universality and the harmless-
ness of self-love. Classical economic theory also identified self-
concern too uncritically with the economic motive and re-
garded self-concern in too individualistic terms. But all these
errors have been overcome as the discipline of economics de-
veloped and as it surveys economic behavior in the whole con-
text of communal relations and in the mixture of motives in
individual and collective man. It is still inclined to obscure
the primacy of the power motive as distinct from the economic
motive; and it certainly has less understanding for the inor-
dinancy of human ambitions than has political science, for
instance. On the other hand, it was the achievement of
classical economics that it harnessed self-interest in contrast
to its moral and political suppression in the classical and
medieval period, though the force of self-interest proved not
to be as harmless as classical economists assumed. Democratic
society found it necessary to equalize disproportions of eco-
nomic power in the interest of justice, whereas the original
theory assumed that economic forces alone would make for
balances of power. The contribution of economic theory
toward the growth of a free society was nevertheless con-
siderable.

It may not be possible to generalize about the attitudes
toward self-interest by the diverse schools of political science,
but it is not too hazardous to assert that political science is
nearer to the discipline of historiography than any other
social science and therefore is more likely to appreciate the
power of self-interest as an historical phenomenon. Political
scientists understand, better than the economists, the primacy
of the power impulse in human egotism. And they have no
difficulty in realizing the force of collective self-interest in

THE CLIMAX OF AN EMPIRICAL CULTURE 137

history. They do however find It difficult to appreciate the
mixture of motives in the behavior of nations as well as of
individuals. Hence those who emphasize the power of collec-
tive self-interest are inclined to a too cynical interpretation of
the facts. There is therefore a constant debate between the
"idealists" and "realists" about the interpretation of man's
collective behavior, particularly that of the nation. The ideal-
ists do not understand the power and persistence of collective
self-interest and invent various schemes for suppressing and
transmuting it. The "realists/* on the other hand, frequently
approach Thomas Hobbes' cynicism in their emphasis upon
the power of national self-interest and in their belief that no
moral consideration can avail against it.

The errors in modern culture in regard to the mixture of
self-regard and creativity in human behavior occur particularly
in those disciplines of our culture which pride themselves
particularly on their methods of empirical observation.
Whether they are betrayed by the limitations of these methods
(since they are not calculated to measure the complexities
of "normal" human behavior) or whether they are too much
under the influence of the dogmas of the Enlightenment, they
have an almost universal attitude toward the problem of
egotism. It consists in regarding self-interest as ordinate and
harmless, provided it is not unduly frustrated by what Holbach
defined as "bad rulers." In the modern context this means
any political, cultural or religious efforts to criticize, suppress
or transmute egotism. They also look for specific causes of
inordinate forms of egotism, which become in effect the causes
of egotism in general, so that the progressive elimination or
mitigation of the factor of self-regard is assumed in these
analyses.

Professor Dewey summarizes a great deal of modern so-
ciological and psychological theory of human nature in his
Human Nature and Conduct. He asserts: "Moralists are led,
perhaps, to think of human nature as evil because of its
reluctance to yield to control, its rebelliousness under the yoke.
But this explanation only raises another question. Why did

THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

morality set up rules so foreign to human nature? ... We
are forced therefore to consider the nature and origin of
the control of human nature with which morals has been
occupied. . . . Control has been invested in an oligarchy.
Indifference to regulations has grown in the gap which sep-
arates the rulers from the ruled. Parents, priests, chiefs, and
social censors have supplied aims which were foreign to those
upon whom they were imposed, the young, laymen, ordinary
folk. A few have administered and given rules; and the mass
have with reluctance and in a passable fashion, obeyed/' Pro-
fessor Dewey, following this diagnosis of the contradictions
In which human beings are involved by reason of the fact
that "there is a law in their members which wars against the
law that is in their minds," proceeds to prescribe a cure.
It consists of a more "scientific" projection of rules and aims
of human conduct, and would be formulated by more com-
petent "rulers" than parents and priests. It would overcome
the contradiction between man's self-regard and his social
impulses by a more scientific channeling of all the "drives"
in human nature. Professor Dewey explicitly disavows the
Marxist implications of his theory. "No matter how much men
have turned moral rules into an agency of class supremacy,"
he declares, "the theory which attributes the origin of rules
to deliberate design is false. . . . Lack of understanding of
human nature is the primary cause of the disregard of it. ...
When men had no scientific understanding of nature they
either passively submitted to it or sought to control it magi-
cally." 9 Dewey naturally promises that the scientific knowledge
of human nature will work all the transformations which the
knowledge of nature accomplished. It will particularly provide
more competent rules to which men will not be so reluctant
to conform because they will be constructed in greater ac-
cordance with the potentialities of human nature.

The most impressive modern psychological version of the
Enlightenment theory of an essentially harmless self-regard,

9 John Dewey: Human Nature and Conduct, Henry Holt and Co.,
Inc., pp. 2-3.

THE CLIMAX OF AN EMPIRICAL CULTURE 139

which becomes harmful only when frustrated, is given by
the Neo-Freudian Erich Fromm, in his Man -for Himself. He
presents the thesis that men must first seek their own happi-
ness, whereupon they may then love others as a "phenomenon
of abundance." "Authoritarian religion" interferes with this
simple fact of human nature by confronting the selfish self
with the "command" to love the neighbor. Naturally a con-
tradiction is established between the natural desires of the
self and the moral command. Fromm sees very clearly that love
is not a simple command to be obeyed. It is truly a phenom-
enon of abundance. The self, which is engrossed with its own
security or prestige, is not free to love. But Fromm does not
see that the security of the self is furnished not by its own
efforts at security, but by the love of others. He also does not
realize that the desire for security or for prestige is, like all
human desires, indeterminate. There is no point at which
the self, seeking its own, can feel itself self-satisfied and free
to consider others than itself. The concern for others is as
indeterminate as the concern for itself. These concerns are
not in the "id" on the one hand and the "super-ego" on the
other hand. Fromm has merely elaborated Freud's picture of
the "ego" as torn between the demands of the "id" and the
"super-ego."

"The demand to love our neighbors as ourselves is the
strongest defence against human aggressiveness and is a super-
lative example of the unpsychological attitude of the cultural
super-ego," declares Freud. "The command is impossible to
fulfill. The enormous inflation of love can only lower its
value and not remedy the evil. Civilization pays no heed to
all of this. It merely prates that the harder to obey the more
laudable the obedience." 10

Actually there is no such tension between a pleasure-seeking
"id" and a demanding "super-ego," not to speak of a "cultural
super-ego." The ego is not an embarrassed broker between
the two forces. The fact is that there are indeterminate de-

10 Sigmund Freud: Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 140.

1-10 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

sues within the self, both for self-aggrandisement and for
fcelf -giving. The failure to recognize this fact makes Freud-
lamsra, whether in its early or in its later and refined forms,
quite irrelevant to political problems. For political life must
deal with the bewildering mixture of self-concern and crea-
tivity on all levels of community.

There is no ' 'empirical" evidence for Freud's thesis that
"aggressiveness" increases with the wider and wider demands
upon the self with an ever-widening social organization. The
evidence for this thesis is taken from neurotic individuals but
is irrelevant to the behavior of "normal" individuals, who
are involved in varied mixtures of ambition (not "aggres-
siveness") and creative concern for family, community, nation
and civilization. This miscalculation probably accounts for
the difference between the therapeutic success of Freudianism
in dealing with deranged persons or neurotic individuals, and
its irrelevance to any political problem faced by modern men.
It is significant that the professional jealousies which Freud
encountered in his early life as he rose to success and the ele-
ment of jealousy which entered into the friction between him
and Jung in later years are not explained in any Freudian
theory. Only one of the younger colleagues who were envious
of his success was obviously neurotic.

A Neo-Freudian of great insight and wisdom, Karen Horney,
has attempted a further refinement of Freud's protest against
the baneful effects of the demands of the "cultural super-
ego." ai According to Miss Horney, human beings would grow
naturally to fulfill their potentialities if the demand for the
unconditioned and the perfect did not interfere with their
nature. She wisely recognizes that the search lor absolute power
and for absolute goodness are generically alike, and she proves
that they may both lead to neuroses. She attributes the demand
tor absolute goodness to the influence of the religious demand
"Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect/'
But she does not realize that the same teacher who uttered

11 Karen Horney: Neuroses and Human Growth.

THE CLIMAX OF AN EMPIRICAL CULTURE 141

this demand rigorously rejected the claim which men make of
achieving perfection.

The parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, in which
the repentant sinner is "justified before the other/' namely,
the Pharisee who thanked God that he "is not as other men/'
is a clear refutation of the pretension which men make of
standing upon some absolute ground, and which distinguishes
them from other men who are obviously involved in the ambig-
uities of human history.

The desire for the absolute, whether for power or perfec-
tion, is not introduced by any particular doctrine or religion,
but grows up spontaneously in human nature and creates
many effects in human relations, even when the impulse does
not create the neuroses which Miss Horney analyzes so ef-
fectively.

An anthropologist, Professor Ashley Montagu, has a version
of the rise of human selfishness which resembles the psy-
chiatric theories of Harry Stack Sullivan. 12 He recognizes that
the security, which frees men to love their fellow men is pro-
vided by the love and esteem of their fellow men, or rather
more particularly by the mother who guards the security of
the infant (or in Sullivan's phrase the "mothering one," that
is, anyone who has chief responsibility for the infant's se-
curity) . Any undue self-concern is therefore due to a defect
in love in the infancy of the child.

"Science points the way to survival and happiness," declares
Professor Montagu, "through love and co-operation. Do what
we will, our drives toward goodness are as biologically deter-
mined as our drives toward breathing." 13 Montagu derives
defects in human character from defective securities in the
life of the child, "particularly in the first six years." All this is
true, of course, upon its own level; but hardly explores the
possibilities of both good and evil above the biological level.
It must also be observed that the theory places a rather heavy

12 c/. Harry Stack Sullivan: The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry.
is Ashley Montagu: On Being Human, p. 101.

142 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

load upon the shoulders of the mothers because it can not
conceive of egotism arising in the individual without specific
cause. Montagu is not able to explore this dimension because
he does not know the self in its depth of selfhood. "Free
will the person does not have/' he declares. "The will that
he has operates strictly within the limits determined by the
pattern of the social group. What he has is the illusion of free
will." 14

It is this preoccupation with particular causes of particular
forms of egotism which grows out of the denial o the self s
unique free selfhood. "Man is suffering from an organismic
dislocation from the environment, from an 'I* complex or
1 persona/ " writes a modern anthropologist in this vein
of seeking for specific causes of a universal malady. 15 "The
result is a divisiveness of function, in which disassociation and
conflict assume supremacy over the organisms, unity and cen-
tralization of function." Mr. Burrow fails to state that this
"dislocation" characterizes all human social organisms, as
contrasted with the harmony of the ant-hill.

(C) The naturalistic presuppositions of the modern be-
havioral sciences, particularly the strong influence of Freudian
thought upon, not only psychology, but anthropology and
sociology, creates a contradiction between their view and
that of common-sense wisdom with reference to the dramatic
essence of history.

The determinists and voluntarists may quarrel on whether
a man is the creature of his culture or whether a scientist
is the potential master of it. But in any event, what they are
talking about is not the tragic historical drama in which we
are all involved, which we feel challenged to deflect from
the most dire possibilities sensed by all men and over which
we feel nevertheless no power to control and no omniscience
to foretell even generally feared probabilities. The drama
remains unpredictable. There is nothing m the behavioral

., p. 74.

isTrigant Burrow: "The Social Neurosis, a Study in Clinical Anthro-
pology/' in Philosophy of Science, Vol. 16, pp. 25-40.

THE CLIMAX OF AN EMPIRICAL CULTURE 143

sciences, for Instance, which would prepare a nation like our
own for the fate of being more impotent to control its destiny
in the days of its seeming omnipotence than in the impotence
and innocency of its infancy.

Nor is there, for all the "cultural relativism" of our an-
thropologists, an appreciation of the genuinely historical dif-
ference between the cultures of, say, Britain, France and Ger-
many. The tragedy of Germany must be analyzed in terms
of a dozen complex historical factors, involving such geo-
graphic factors as its place in the heart of the European
Continent; such social factors as the political incompetence of
its middle class and the military preoccupation of its aristoc-
facy; and such cultural factors as the political ineptness of a
metaphysically gifted people.

It certainly can not be explained as the consequence of
defects in the toilet training which German mothers give their
children. For that matter the excessive libertarian tendencies
of American political thought have obviously more complex
causes than the "anthropological" one of the rejection by
American immigrants of their European "father." 1S

The tragic phenomenon of world-wide communism, with its
Russian center and base, does not yield its secrets to an em-
piricism which draws comparisons between the present Russia
and "Eastern Christendom," nor to one which surveys the
historic swaddling of infants in Russia as the alleged cause
of the docility of a people. Communism is in fact a monstrous
mergence of power impulses with Utopian dreams for which
the whole history of a Christian culture is required to explain.

It is not too broad a generalization to say that the em-
piricism of the "free world" is pervaded almost as much by
Freudian and quasi-Freudian thought as the culture of the
tyrannies Is dominated by Marxist thought. This Freudian
psychology and anthropology is, however, therapeutically skill-
ful in dealing with maladjusted individuals, irrelevant to all
genuinely historic situations. It does not understand how the
Individual Is creatively involved in the historic situations of

ie Cf. Geoffrey Gorer: The American People.

144 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

which he is also the creature and victim. Freud is ambivalent
toward the realities of cultural development. On the one hand,
as, for instance, in his Civilization and Its Discontents, he is in
the romantic tradition of pessimism toward the achievements
of civilization and betrays a characteristic romantic preference
for primitivism. Each elaboration of culture and civilization
merely increases the almost intolerable tension between the
pleasure seeking "id" and the ever more rigorous demands of
the "cultural super-ego/' i.e., the moral requirements of
a complex civilization. The poor "ego" is caught in this ten-
sion; and its frustrations create ever more dangerous incre-
ments of "aggressiveness."

On the other hand, Freud is a modern exponent of Enlight-
enment doctrine who believes that "our best hope of the future
is that the intellect, the scientific spirit, should establish a
dictatorship over the human mind." 17 The one theory is as
irrelevant to historic situations as the other because the self
and its mind create ever new elaborations of culture; and there
is no increasing tension between the cultural situation and a
primitive "id." On the other hand, the self and its mind are too
involved in every historic situation to be simply redeemed from
them by the "dictatorship" of the scientific spirit.

In short, a "Freudian" empiricism is as incapable as
Hegelian metaphysics to comprehend the self in Its dramatic
environment. For the self Is at once the creator and the crea-
ture of every historic situation; and it maintains the wholeness
of its person In all these situations, whatever may be the
tensions between Its "mind and body" or its "id" and "super-
ego."

We thus confront the ironic fact that a culture, intent upon
understanding nature and boasting of ever more impressive
achievements in the "conquest" of nature, has become involved
in ever more serious misunderstandings of human nature, of
the self in its uniqueness, and In its dramatic-historical
environment.

17 Sigmund Freud New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, p. 234.

Part HI

DRAMATIC, ORGANIC AND CON-
TRACTUAL ELEMENTS OF THE SELF'S EFFORTS TO
BUILD COMMUNITIES. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
ORGANISM AND ARTIFACT DUE TO THE DISTINC-
TION BETWEEN THE SELF AS CREATURE AND AS
CREATOR OF HISTORICAL DESTINY. THE INCREAS-
ING PROPORTION OF ARTIFACT IN MODERN COM-
MUNITIES. CAN THE WORLD COMMUNITY BE
FASHIONED PURELY AS ARTIFACT?

Chapter

THE RESOURCES OF THE CHRISTIAN
FAITH IN A DYNAMIC CIVILIZATION
AND AN EXPANDING SOCIETY

.he Christian faith undoubtedly survives in a
so-called "modern" age in which scientific development is sup-
posed to have invalidated it. It survives, in part, because all
the testimonies of philosophers and scientists against it can
not avail against the inner witness of the human self, that
it is a real self, burdened with both responsibility and guilt
(burdened with the latter because it has not adequately ful-
filled the former) .

Religious faith in both Catholic and Protestant versions
of Christianity and in the Jewish version of Biblical faith
survives most vitally in the backward "regions," that is, in
those sections of culture in which the failure of religion to
come to terms with the undoubted truths disclosed by the
disciplines of philosophy and the sciences is not found too
embarrassing, and where the efforts to disabuse the self of its
selfhood are not too effective. It is however a serious mistake
to relegate Biblical faith merely to the backwaters of our cul-
ture. For men need not be too obviously simple to escape the
baneful effects of a sophisticated culture, which erroneously
regards faith as merely the remnant of man's earlier impotence
(Marx) or as the projection of infantile fantasies (Freud) .

147

148 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

The persistence of the problem of selfhood and the inability
to fit the self into any system of coherence which the wise
men of this and other ages devise for it is not, of course,
a proof of the validity of a faith which discerns, or thinks it
discerns, another dimension of reality beyond the coherences
of nature and reason, in which both the freedom and the guilt
of the self are understood and in which the former meets
judgement, and the salve of forgiveness is applied to the
hurt of the latter.

But even if the private relevance of faith be granted and
it be understood that it is more than a source of comfort for
individuals in the hours of their extremity (that is, when
they confront the facts of both death and sin) , it is not clear
whether or how there is any resource in Biblical faith for
the problems of the community, for aiding men in organizing
and reorganizing their common life, particularly in a civiliza-
tion, in which growingiy powerful technics continually alter
the conditions of human togetherness both by expanding the
communities on all levels and by making the requirements of
'justice increasingly complex. The task of harnessing, deflect-
ing and suppressing self-interest for the sake of the larger
interest becomes ever more difficult, and the equilibria of
social power upon which justice depends become ever more
tentative in the shifting circumstance of a technical age.

These communal problems require above all the application
of discriminating intelligence, which knows how to distin-
guish between constant and variable factors in a social situa-
tion and which is informed by the empirical spirit, by a
genuine "humility before the fact" in defiance of dogmas,
whether of a religious or rationalistic variety. It would seem
therefore that the modern prejudice, which looks to all the
disciplines informed by the spirit of the Renaissance for guid-
ance, were justified. But unfortunately some of the facts
which a modern empiricism obscures because of its own hid-
den dogmas must be clearly seen if men are to solve the
problems of their togetherness. Thus the seemingly irrelevant
Biblical faith becomes relevant to the socilal situation. It was

THE RESOURCES OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 149

relevant even in the days when It seemed to have been per-
manently relegated to the status of ueberwundener Stand-
punkt. Insofar as modern men have solved their social prob-
lems and achieved communities in which the individual had
a tolerable freedom and the community preserved a tolerable
stability, and classes were related to each other In a tolerable
justice, it will be found that both components of our culture,
the Hebraic and the Hellenic, the Biblical and the classical
made, if not equal, yet equally necessary contributions to the
result.

At Its best the Biblical faith guarded the "facts" of freedom
and responsibility and acknowledged the self-concern of the
self, which a more pretentious empiricism denied. It also
introduced a sense of the dramatic quality of history and the
uniqueness of its various occasions which underlies the em-
piricism of an Edmund Burke as contrasted with the alleged
empiricism of the French Revolution. At its best, the Renais-
sance faith introduced the disciplines of rational discrimination
which religious dogmas effaced or obscured.

At their worst, the two forces of piety and rationalism
introduced similar errors into the social situation in the
very debate in which they polemicised against their respective
errors. There is an Ironic quality in the debate between the
pious and the rationalistic exponents of freedom and justice.
Each accuses the other of introducing false absolutes into the
contingencies of history. For the pious, the absolute is the
will of God; and for the rationalists, it is the dictate of rea-
son. Yet each side is guilty in its own way of the error of
which it accuses the other.

The pious conceive of the worship of God to be a guar-
antee against the worship of idols, that is, against undue
reverence for, or loyalty to, contingent and finite values.
Ideally the worship of the true God emancipates the soul
from the worship of self, either Individually or collectively.
Actually the history of religious fanaticism proves that It is
fairly easy to claim identity between the absolute and the
contingent value, and thus to claim divine validity for a

150 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

"Christian" civilization despite all of its moral ambiguities,
and to use the Christian faith as a weapon against the foe
in all kinds of historic encounters.

Reason, according to the faith of a rationalistic culture, will
dissolve all these irrationalities and force men to claim for
themselves only those privileges which will fit into a total
scheme of coherence. Reason, argued Condorcet, would force
the privileged to yield their privileges, and education would
arm the simple with new weapons against the shrewd. Were
not most injustices due as much to the shrewd taking ad-
vantage of the simple as of the strong taking advantage of
the weak? All class distinctions were, according to an an-
thropologist, Robert Briffault, due to religious prejudices,
which would be dissolved by rational analysis. 1 He forgot
that it was Aristotle who gave the most plausible justification
of slavery in rational terms when he declared the institution
to be the natural consequence of the difference in the endow-
ments of men, of whom the intelligent were by nature des-
tined to command while the unintelligent were by nature
"tools."

The simple fact is that neither the classical, the medieval
nor the modern rationalists recognized that it is as easy to
identify the interest of the self with a universally acknowl-
edged right or value as to identify it with the will of God.
That is why we have had such an ironic conflict between the
pious and the rationalists, each of them aware of the hypoc-
risy of the other but neither of them aware of the dishonesty
in themselves. Ideally a Christian faith makes for humility
and charity because it subjects both the claims and the pre-
tensions of the self to an ultimate judgement. Actually re-
ligion makes for fanatic claims as frequently or more fre-
quently than it generates charity for reasons already analyzed.

Ideally the cultivation of reason makes for "reasonable-
ness." It moderates claims by weighing each claim against
competing claims and by challenging traditionally estab-

i Robert Briffault: Rational Evolution.

THE RESOURCES OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 151

lished privileges with the question whether they are justified
by social function or any consideration of the commonweal.
Actually the logical process does no more than work out con-
clusions on the basis of the premises upon which the process
is based. The logical man will not assert that all men are
mortal because Socrates is mortal. He will assert that Socrates
is mortal because all men are. But if we apply logic to human
affairs, we readily see how the premises determine the con-
clusions and how interest determines the adoption of the
premises.

Kant tried to place logic in the service of morals by his
dictum, "So act as to make thine action on the basis of univer-
sal law." But if we begin with the not unjustified premise
that special services to the community require special incen-
tives and that special functions justify privileges related to
the function, we can rationally claim every kind of special
privilege for ourselves by the sanction of "universal law."
Therefore, the Enlightenment was not as successful in estab-
lishing "liberty and equality" as it had hoped. It failed not
only because so many privileges and coercive restraints were
more justified than it had thought, but also because power
is able to justify even unjustified privileges if it begins the
logical process with premises which seem to justify them.
Gradually, of course, a rational analysis of all the permanent
and the contingent factors in a social situation will reveal
liberty and equality to be the regulative principles of justice,
and will discover how much these regulative principles must
be compromised in practice in order to permit society to or-
ganize by the inevitable hierarchy of authority by which all
communities are integrated. Ultimately, the two principles of
liberty and equality, both of which were regarded as "self-
evident" by the Enlightenment, proved to be in conflict with
one another, the middle classes insisting on a preference for
liberty, and the industrial classes for equality. These pref-
erences were the occasion for the civil war which rent the
unity of most Western societies. The preference for each
value by the respective class was advanced the more fanatically

THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

because it was supposed to be rationally justified. Yet each
preference was ideologically motivated. The middle classes
preferred liberty because they wanted as little as possible
control by the State of their economic activities. The indus-
trial workers, on the other hand, having no significant
social power of their own and being prompted by justified and
unjustified resentments against the hierarchical structure of
society, preferred equality to liberty. If the premises of com-
munist logic are granted, namely, that "all history is the his-
tory of class struggles/' and that class distinctions are pro-
gressively heightened until they lead to the climax of a revo-
lution, then everything in the communist conclusions proceeds
in an inevitable manner from these premises. It is of course
also "rational" to refute the premises of communist logic
empirically, to prove that there are more complex class ten-
sions than are assumed in the communist premises and that
they are modified rather than heightened in a technical society,
and that the institution of property is not the sole cause of
social injustice.

Thus it would seem that empirical reasoning is a safeguard
against the fanaticism of abstract reasoning, which begins
with premises not warranted by the facts of experience. But
we have previously noted that the causal chains of history
are so complex that it is impossible to refute even the most
fanatic theory with absolutely compelling logic.

It is significant that not only political arguments informed
by obviously untrue presuppositions lead to erroneous re-
sults. Even non-communist political parties seek their ends
by reasoning which is an offense to common sense. Thus, for
instance, it has been a favorite argument of Republicans that
during the Democratic Administration over a billion people
in the world came under the yoke of communism. This argu-
ment was supposed to prove that any administration in
America could, by a different policy, have prevented the
course of events in the revolutionary ferments of Asia. The
argument involved the logical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter
hoc and it assumed an American omnipotence in world affairs

THE RESOURCES OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 153

which was contrary to the obvious facts. But since America
is very powerful and since our foreign policy is designed to
prevent events unfavorable to our interests, the inherent ab-
surdity of the political logic is not universally apparent.
Political arguments are in fact both a proof of the inner
necessity of men to reason so as to make their interests seem
to be in accord with universally valid values and of the
inclination to bend reason more or less patently to their ends.
Political arguments certainly prove that it is not possible
to compel the self to abate its claims because a fault has
been proved in the logic by which those claims are advanced.

In short, reason may be as obedient a servant of particular
interests as religion. Both are the more plausible servants
because the presumption of truth, transcendent to interest,
is implied in both faith and reason. This is why rational
discrimination is necessary to weigh the claims made for the
self in the name of both faith and reason. That would make
the virtue of a scientific culture an antidote against the
defects of both religious and rationalistic claims. But the
insight of an historic faith is required to understand the self
which is both able and inclined to use either religion or reason,
or both, as the servants of its interests, even while it may
honestly long for the absolute truth which one or the other
allegedly guarantees.

The irony of the conflict between the pious and the ration-
alists, each accusing the other of introducing partial interests
into their vision of the truth, is exceeded by another irony
in the modern debate. In that irony only the typically modern
element in our culture is involved. It is created by the mod-
ern belief that traditional religion is too "other-worldly," too
interested or preoccupied with trans-historical consummations
of life to be effective in establishing freedom and justice upon
the earth. It believes that it is only necessary to disavow
"heaven" and concentrate upon historical goals to achieve
whatever summum bonum the imagination may suggest. Yet
it is precisely this consistent this-worldliness which has intro-
duced the final evils into contemporary history. For the

154 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

claim of having realized the final consummation in history
is certainly even more dangerous than the claim of having
reached the final truth.

The irony of modern Utopian pretensions and illusions,
which have corrupted our culture since the Renaissance and
reached their climax in the French Enlightenment, has been
heightened by the fact that these illusions of the absolute
goal, being either reached or reachable, have been generated
in a culture which professed to be interested merely in the
process of history, and thought that history was but a
variation of the process of nature. Nothing could bear more
telling testimony to the fact that man is more capable of
betraying himself as a creature, worried about the absolute,
than these inadvertent yearnings, even when he explicitly
disavows any dimension of his life above the temporal process.
Thus we have been involved in renouncing an incredible
heaven only to build a more incredible, and much more
dangerous, heaven on earth. To add to the depth of the
irony, these Utopian illusions have developed not only within
the limits of a strict naturalism, but in the name of a rigorous
empiricism. A culture which has prided itself on tracing the
specific causes of specific evils either expected Utopia when
it had rid the world of all specific evils by improvements in
government, education and psychiatric technics, or it came
to the surprising conclusion that all evils were due to one
specific cause, the institution of property, for instance. There-
fore the elimination of this cause would guarantee the crea-
tion of a heaven on earth. Unfortunately it occurred to none
of these empiricists that each individual self might, in its
radical freedom, be the fountain source of ever new evils
in history, its destructiveness having the same root as its
creativity.

This failure of modern culture to solve the problem of
the relation of the self and its history to the absolute or
unconditioned is revealed not only in its disavowal of the
transcendent goals of life. It is betrayed, too, in the lack oi
comprehension for the double truth which the Christian faith

THE RESOURCES OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 155

beholds in the Christ-drama. In classical versions of the Chris-
tian faith Christ significantly symbolizes both the indeter-
minate possibilities of historical achievement and also the
divine mercy which understands the tension and contradiction
between all forms of human virtue and achievement and the
divine will. When this second dimension of the Christ-revela-
tion is obscured (as it is in both the Renaissance culture and
in that portion of the Protestant faith which has absorbed
the illusions of modern culture) the cultural atmosphere
becomes suffused with an air of sentimentality. Thus the
Enlightenment regarded liberty and equality, not as regula-
tive principles of justice, but as simple possibilities of history.
Liberal Christianity aggravated, rather than mitigated, these
illusions by suggesting that love, which appears in history
most tragically when it is most perfect, could be a simple his-
torical possibility. Liberal Christianity therefore merely added
to the general sentimentality of the age. The outstanding Prot-
estant theologian of the nineteenth century, Albrecht Ritschl,
whose influence extended throughout the world, illustrated
this defect of liberal Christianity. He could treat of the cen-
tral theme of Christian faith, namely, that "God was in
Christ reconciling the world unto Himself" in a systematic
treatment which combined Kantian and Lutheran elements.
But the Kantian elements were obviously dominant because
Ritschl believed that men needed to be reconciled to God
only because of their ignorance. "Insofar as men are re-
garded as sinners/' he wrote, "both in their individual capacity
and as a whole, they are objects of redemption and recon-
ciliation, made possible by the love of God. Sin is estimated
by God, not as the final purpose of opposition to the known
will of God but as ignorance." 2 Thus the whole Biblical
doctrine of the seriousness of sin and the necessity of for-
giveness is emptied of its meaning and the view of the human
situation is altered to conform to the prejudices of the
Enlightenment.

2 Albrecht Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, p 384.

156 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

The form of interpreting the central revelation of the
Christian faith is really the best indication of the ethos of
an age. If the two facets of the revelation in Christ are not
appreciated, and the figure of Christ is interpreted merely as
a symbol and example of human virtue, all that is expressed
in Biblical faith from the prophets to the final revelation
which emphasizes the continued ambiguity in all historic
achievements, is lost. Christianity, in that event, becomes
merely another form of "idealism" in and through which men
deceive themselves, believing that their actions and lives are
as good as the ideals which they are able to entertain.

In individual life this means that the love, which is the
core of the Christian "ideal/* is regarded as a simple fruit
of the human will. It thereby becomes impossible by the very
confidence that it is a simple possibility. The "love of Christ,"
according to the New Testament, is either forgiving or sacri-
ficial love. It therefore depends upon humility and the knowl-
edge of the common involvement of all men in sin on the
one hand; and upon "grace" beyond the capacity of anyone's
will on the other hand.

In terms of social and political wisdom the destruction of
the paradox contained in the concept of a crucified Savior
means that there is no understanding of the fact that even
the best social structures and schemes of justice may be in
contradiction to the "Love of Christ." The elements of self-
regard and partial interest are not detected in their preten-
sions of universal validity. Consequently the enlarging sphere
of social obligation and the greater perfection of communica-
tions, by which communities are integrated, are falsely inter-
preted as evidences of "progress"; and the perennial contra-
dictions in life to the felt moral imperative are obscured. We
have previously analyzed the curious contradiction between
the wisdom of common sense and these illusions. For common
sense never doubts that it must deal with the egotism of men
on every level of community; but the more sophisticated
wisdom is constantly beguiled by the "progressive" elements
in the historic situation to imagine that developing technics

THE RESOURCES OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 157

have permanently eliminated the powerful and persistent fac-
tors of self-interest or parochial interest which operate on
every level of community in contradiction to the enlarging
communities and systems of obligation.

Thus a tolerable solution of modern man's communal prob-
lem within terms, created by developing technics and shifting
social circumstances, requires that we approach these problems
armed by wisdom drawn from two sources. We must h ave the
wisdom of rational discrimination and the sense of a develop-
ingTIisloricaT ^fHaEon"!^ We" mWt7~oirihe

otner^hand, be cQnsciousjo^thejgerennial factors" whicTTappeaf
in ever new guises. This latter wisdom is, as we haveTrecog-
nized, suppliedHBy '"common sense." But common sense Is
easily beguiled by pretentious and sophisticated wisdom If
the pride and self-esteem of man is not continually challenged
by a prophetic religious faith which knows that the wise,
the mighty, the virtuous and the noble, that in fact all men
and all cultures, stand under a more ultimate judgement
than any of the judgements which they pass upon themselves
and upon each other.

Perhaps the chief cause of illusion in that part of our cul-
ture which prides itself upon its reason and its understanding
of the flow of history Is that it persists in regarding the root
of man's self-regard as the force of his immediate needs. It
thinks of itself as very realistic if it recognizes the perennial
necessities of survival, the hungers and thirst of men; if it
knows the economic competitions between groups within a
nation, and the economic roots of nationalistic and imperial-
istic ambitions of the nations. This kind of realism falls to
understand the power Impulse as distinguished from the
economic motive. It is equally blind to the fact that the
desire for power and for prestige are curiously compounded.
It understands man as a hungry animal; and If It rises to
higher levels of realism, it may understand man as a "beast
of prey." At the heights of its realism it does not, how-
evei^j^cteratS^^ "wHen he pre-

tends to be God or to have possession of somelaBsoIutFstana-

158 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

ard of virtue or wisdom. If modern culture understands the
nature"~of persecmi^^_it^lso^mlsunderstands it because itj
atttibuteTTanaticism purely to an outmoded religious belief,
which a growing ^intelligence will dissolve. In short, it does
not understand man at all as a creature of time who is trou-
bled with visions of the .absolute and is torn by the contra-
dictory impulses to subject his finite life to someone or some-
thing greater than himself, but also to claim the possession
oi j^^e^vi^giiditioned ground of virtue and wisdom from
his fellow roen^and^ hold jthejn_in

Modern culture does not understand, above all, how closely
Delated the two impulses are, and how inextricably the crea-
tivity and destructiveness of men are related, so that the
rises with the historic elaborations of his

^

Teativity. Therefore resistance~tcrydme ihclusIve"vaIuF9SeslTot
resicle in some pleasure-seeking "id," which the complexities
3f civilized life subject to^morejgid more strain; nor in some
imgSTEung^'which may be transmuted, satisfied^and de-
flected unuTirc^sSesTo^'be dangerous. iVjiJalHa^thejwfiole

desmictivenessTTn

both self-regard and the sei^_ofjobligatipn_,to Jiis fellows.
I^JSJ^i^whofe man wEojfides^the^ jEqrwaicd^S^Ich of history
and exhibits capacities for both good and evil on every level
of culture and civjlpation. ""

Therefore it is necessary to draw constantly on the insights
of Biblical faith, particularly in an age in which human
achievements are great, and illusions threaten to be as great as
the achievements. The obvious, and yet so hidden, dilemma
of human creativity, must be clarified.

This is why the Hebraic-Christian component of our culture
is a necessary tool for the understanding of both our com-
munity and of ourselves, and remains perennially relevant even
when it is relegated by the contemporary wise men to oblivion.
This is true even if conventional forms of faith violate Chris-
tianity's deepest insights and become involved in fanaticisms
for which a genuine faith ought to be the cure.

THE RESOURCES OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

But this relevance does not, of course, invalidate the gen-
uine contributions which may be drawn from the culture
which had its inception in the Renaissance. Among these con-
tributions the capacity for rational discrimination in the
analysis of historical causes and the sense of developing his-
torical opportunities and obligations are most precious.

The partially contrasting virtues and weaknesses of a Chris-
tian and a secular culture in estimating both the possibilities
and the limits of human striving, and the partially identical
illusions of both cultures, operating in the name of either
"God" or "reason," have made the achievement of community
in the "Christian" world dependent upon the unplanned co-
operation of these two facets of a common culture. In some
situations the error in the truth of the one facet was cor-
rected by the truth in the error of the other; and on other
occasions the weakness of the one was compensated by the
virtue of the other. What has emerged in history has, in any
case, been better than either component had the wit or wisdom
to realize. Modern Western history since the disintegration of
the medieval synthesis has, in short, been a dramatic en-
counter between the Biblical-Hebraic and the Hellenic com-
ponents of our culture in which the emergence of dynamic
factors of a technical civilization gave a new dimension to the
ancient encounter.

The dialectical tension between the two components in our
culture was rooted in the fact that each was capable of realiz-
ing some facts of human existence and tended to be blind
to others. The Hebraic saw history as a drama and the Hellenic
looked for the structures which underlie the flow of history.
The Hebraic was conscious of the organic aspects of human
community while the Hellenic discerned the elements of
artifact which had been introduced into the community by
human contrivance. The Hebraic had a sense of divine provi-
dence as ruling over history because it was conscious of the
creatureliness of man in the process. Modernized Hellenism
was so conscious of the role of man as creator that it became
defective in the sense of providence and alternated between

160 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

an excessive determinism and an excessive voluntarism. It
significantly always managed to put the determinism in the
service of the voluntarism so that man always appeared to be,
or to become, the master of historical destiny. In Marxist or
liberal hopes this transformation from ambiguity to mastery
was just about to take place. In corrupt Marxism (Stalinism)
the claim is made that it has taken place.

The similar corruptions of fanaticism in both piety and
rationalism are particularly instructive. They both point to
the tendency of finite and creaturely man to think more highly
of himself than he ought to think. The problem of community
is confused more by these absolutistic pretensions than by
the hunger for bread and by the competition for the re-
sources of the earth. The pious try to moderate the pretension
by subjecting human pride to divine judgement. The rational-
ists seek to bring it under critical social scrutiny. Both methods
of restraint are necessary, but both methods are also defective.
One might claim that it is possible to realize why they are
defective from the standpoint of the Christian faith but not
from the Hellenic modern standpoint. But this understand-
ing must not be regarded as eliminating the defect.

The chief issue between the two components develops on
the issue of the realization of the potentialities of history.
The Biblical faith accepts the fact that historical meanings
and fulfillments remain fragmentary to the end of history.
It even anticipates the growth of both good and evil in
history so that the ambiguities of meaning are heightened
rather than diminished. Modern rationalism on this issue is
not at all Hellenic. It has more confidence in history than
the Greek philosophers had. It seeks to bring history to a
rationally intelligible conclusion. Invariably these Utopian
dreams bring new evil into history because the proposed ful-
fillment of historical potentialities reveals itself to be but the
pretension of some class, nation or group that its cherished
values have a right to triumph over all competing values.

We must therefore rely upon Biblical faith to encourage
the modesty and patience which will prevent present tensions

THE RESOURCES OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 167

from becoming catastrophic because the contestants, either one
or both, are trying to bring history to a premature conclusion.

The preferences of the two components of our culture for
the organic qualities of community on the one hand, and
for the qualities of artifact on the other, would seem to stand
in complete contradiction to their original presuppositions.
The one begins by emphasizing the freedom oi the self,
while the other sees the self as either mind or as a part of
nature. The effort to understand the self as a part of nature
becomes more and more consistent, as we have seen. Yet this
inclination in modern culture does not prevent, but actually
encourages the most Utopian conceptions of the possibility
of community through the volitions of men. On the other
hand, the component of the culture which is supposedly
based upon an appreciation of the qualities of freedom in
the self and of its capacities for dramatic elaborations, de-
velops the most consistently organic forms of togetherness in
which the freedom of the person is obscured and in which
novelty and new emergences are feared, too consistently
feared, as the breeders of anarchy.

A portion of this preference for the organic and the tra-
ditional must be attributed simply to that lack of discrimina-
tion to which religious faith easily degenerated. But a por-
tion must be attributed to the fact that religion, drawn from
the Bible, is as conscious of man's status as a creature as of
his eminence as a creator. The concomitant of this knowledge
of man's finiteness is faith in an overruling providence which
presides over a drama of such proportions that we can not
fully discern its intent and meaning, and are certainly in-
capable of basically altering its meaning. But this religious
conservatism is also partly drawn from the fear of man as
destroyer of community, that is, the fear of his selfishness.
Traditional forms of community are preferred because it is
felt that it is better to restrain the ambitions of men by the
established patterns of togetherness than to run the danger
of anarchy by the removal of traditional habits and restraints.
This fear of anarchy proved, as we shall see, to be excessive.

162 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

It prevented modern communities from emancipating them-
selves from the tyranny of the older traditional forms of
community. On the other hand, the rationalists of the eight-
eenth century who imagined that it was only necessary for
reason to dissolve traditional loyalties and to substitute the
artifacts of man's reason and will for the organic forms,
found themselves confronting aggravated forms of ancient
evils. They had not sufficiently guarded against perennial
dangers to peace and order inherent in human egotism. These
facts account in part for the strange contradiction that a faith
which ostensibly believes in the freedom and responsibility
of the self is used as an ally of conservative politics, while
a faith which ostensibly believes man to be subject to nature
usually becomes involved in Utopian politics which have no
appreciation of the limits set to human achievement either
by man's finiteness and creatureliness or by his sin.

We must therefore trace the history of how the modern
age found a tolerable solution for its problems of order and
justice in the context of a technical civilization by correcting
the error in the truth of one position by the truth in the
error of the other position. We shall trace this history in
terms of the development of the political theory of modern
democratic states; and the development of the social and
economic strategies which perfected justice in the dynamics
of a technical society by equalizing power in both the eco-
nomic and political sphere. We must finally inquire what
function each component of our culture serves in the pressing
problem of establishing peace, order and justice in tL^' nascent
world community.

Chapter 20

ORGANISM AND ARTIFACT IN DEMO-
CRATIC GOVERNMENT

E,

I very human community is both organism and
artifact. It is an organism insofar as it is integrated by loyal-
ties, forms of cohesion and hierarchies of authority which
have grown unconsciously with a minimum of conscious
contrivance. The concept of "organism" is of course only
roughly applicable to anything in history because historical
developments, even in primitive communities, are never
purely unconscious.

The community and its authorities are artifacts insofar
as the form of cohesion and the integration of the community
have been consciously contrived. The early empires were arti-
facts rathe ^ than organisms insofar as the imperial cohesion,
above the level of the city-states which were the components
of empire, were contrived by the military and priestly states-
men.

All early civilizations, including our European one until
the disintegration of the traditional society of the Middle
Ages, were more nearly organisms than artifacts. Kings and
their ministers did, of course, consciously manipulate the
loyalties which furnished the bonds of community; but no
one thought of the possibility of forming a community or

163

164 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

even a government purely by an act of the will. The "social
contract" theory had not yet been conceived. The principle
of legitimacy in dynastic rule was, in a sense, the symbol
of the organic quality of traditional communities. It ex-
pressed the significance of continuity as a source of authority.
The devotion to the principle was by no means simply proof
of a lack of "enlightenment." Hereditary continuity was so
important for the order of the community because the policy
of subjecting the question of succession to the choice of the
people or the nobles would have exposed the community to
the peril of anarchy. Rome, lacking a stable principle of
succession, hastened its doom by the unsolved problem of
transmitting the vast imperial authority from generation to
generation.

There was, of course, no guarantee that an hereditary
monarch would rule justly. In fact, his power was sufficiently
absolute and irresponsible to make it quite certain that jus-
tice was not a virtue of hereditary monarchy. The preference
of all traditional communities for hereditary dynasts is there-
fore a symbol of the price in injustice which a traditional
community was willing to pay for the good order and peace
of the community. The whole development toward demo-
cratic government in a technical society, which we must trace
more carefully, is, in a sense, the story of trying to achieve
justice without disturbing the order of the community. The
long history of civil strife in modern society proves that
the attempt was not always successful.

Naturally the injustices of traditional governments in-
creased when new emergents in the social structure (modern
commerce for instance) challenged the "organic" or tradi-
tional way of preserving order. Our "modern" age had many
beginnings. But in political history it had an obvious begin-
ning in the revolt against traditional authorities, of which
monarchial power was most symbolic. The revolt was both
inevitable and justified. Unfortunately it created the impres-
sion that it was necessary only to substitute the artifacts of
order for the organisms of community to establish the de-

ORGANISM AND ARTIFACT IN DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 165

sired justice and order. Thereby the permanent significance
of the organic factors of community was obscured. An even
more grievous miscalculation was that the permanent tension
between order and justice was believed to have been elim-
inated.

The symbol of modem man's belief that both community
and government are merely artifacts, that is, the creations of
the human will and reason, is the social contract theory,
which was propounded by such divergent theorists as the
liberal democrat John Locke, the proponent of royal abso-
lutism Thomas Hobbes, and the totalitarian democrat Rous-
seau. The theory assumed a mythical "state of nature" before
the rise of civil society, to which the various theorists attrib-
uted contradictory virtues and vices. For Thomas Hobbes
the state of nature meant the "war of all against all"; for John
Locke it was a state of imperfect order and harmony, suffer-
ing from the "inconvenience" of allowing every man to be
"a judge. in his own case." For Rousseau it was a state of
unabridged freedom. None of these presuppositions, of course,
remotely resembled the character of primitive society. Indeed
the reality of primitive society, of organic communities which
developed into more advanced civilizations proves the invalid-
ity of the assumptions underlying the social contract theory.
For the community is as primordial as the individual. The
social contract theory was merely the expression of the in-
dividualism and voluntarism of the rising business community.
It was beguiled by its possession of mobile and flexible instru-
ments of power and by the disintegration of traditional society
to assume that all men had the power not only to determine
their own destiny but the destiny of their communities.

This excessive voluntarism was of course accompanied by
a confident rationalism. It was thought that men would only
have to exercise their reason to conceive of more just social
and political integrations. Both faith and tradition (for re-
ligion was obviously a support of tradition) were discred-
ited. Were they not simply the "superstitions" which a more
astute intelligence would dissolve?

166 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

These uncritical approaches to the past flowered in the
French Enlightenment, but they characterized the social view-
points of modernity from the seventeenth to the nineteenth
century. They were motivated by a strong desire for justice
within the context of the emerging commercial and indus-
trial community. But they were blind to the contributions
which the traditional organs of community made to communal
integration, failing to recognize that, even if the price in
justice which they exacted was too high, they did serve as
organs of integration.

The organs of communal integration which were under
criticism and which the modern community was forced to re-
vise in the interest of justice were chiefly three, government,
social hierarchy and property. Of these three, the social hier-
archy, which provided for integration below the level of
obvious government, was not so much an "institution" as a
general social phenomenon. Symbolized by traditional aris-
tocracy, it seemed the most useless of the three and its injus-
tices were most obvious. Therefore, the kernel of usefulness
for the community in this phenomenon was least apparent.
Property furthermore seemed to be chiefly an instrument for
making the authority and privilege of this social hierarchy
hereditary.

We must postpone for the moment the consideration of
the problems occasioned by the phenomena of social hier-
archy and property in order to consider the problem of
government and the order of the community. Yet it is difficult
to separate the three institutions, not only because they are
interrelated but because we face the same moral problem in
each one of them. They demand an excessive price of injus-
tice for whatever services they perform in communal inte-
gration. The injustices of a traditional society were in fact
so excessive that the chief victims of its injustice were in revolt
against them in the various peasant revolts at the end of the
Middle Ages, even before the disintegration of the traditional
order set in through the rebellion of the middle classes. The
peasants were driven by desperation but they lacked the social

ORGANISM AND ARTIFACT IN DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 167

power to effect any considerable social change. That change
waited upon the class, armed with sufficient social power to
effect a radical reconstitution of social forces.

Naturally the religious character of the medieval system
and the authority of the Church made the supposition plausi-
ble that religion was the primary force of conservatism. In-
deed religious authority did reinforce the general conserva-
tism of traditional society. But the accusation does not take
into account that both reason and faith were divided upon
the issue of the legitimacy of inequality for the sake of inte-
gration. Rationalism expressed itself in terms of both Stoic
equalitarianism and Aristotelian justifications of inequality.
And the protests against medieval institutions in the name
of equality and liberty came from both seventeenth-century
Christian sectaries and eighteenth-century French philoso-
phers. Each made the mistake of regarding both liberty and
equality as simple possibilities of history rather than as regu-
lative principles of justice because both were unconscious
of the necessity for social integration of the institutions of
government, social hierarchy and property. Naturally the
critical attitude toward inequalities was more prevalent in
the earlier than in the later period. The mark of this de-
velopment was the gradual displacement by Aristotelianism of
the earlier Stoicism as the rational component of Christian
social ethics. For early Christianity the stoic idea of equality
was the best social expression of the meaning of love in
institutional relations.

Augustine regarded equality as God-ordained. "It is thus/'
he declared, "that God created man. 'Let him/ He said, 'have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the
air ... and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon
the earth.' He did not intend that His rational creature who
was made in His image should have dominion over anything
but the irrational creation . . . not man over man but man
over the beasts. . . . And the righteous men in primitive
times were shepherds of cattle rather than kings of men." 1

i St. Augustine: De Cimtate Dei, XIX, Chapter XV.

168 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

This radical equalitarianism in early Christianity was o
course balanced by the idea that government, property and
social hierarchy were "remedies" for sin. It was understood,
in other words, that the egotism of men made these coercive
and unequal integrations necessary. The same Augustine could
thus accept an extreme form of social hierarchy, slavery, with
the excuse that, "It is better to be a slave of men than a slave
of sin/' The miscalculations of future ages in regard to the
inequalities of feudalism are succinctly expressed in that
phrase because slavery is more an accentuation of sin than a
remedy for it.

This indicated the path by which the Christian faith be-
came the defender of the institutions of the status quo rather
than their critic from a perspective of prophetic radicalism.
This religious reverence is older than Christianity. Religious
overtones in the establishment of order were explicit to the
point of an idolatrous worship of the monarch in all ancient
empires. These empires were created by transferring the re-
ligious reverence for the "sacred brotherhood" to the sacred
ruler; from the brotherhood of the primitive community to
the ruler of the great empire which could not be imagina-
tively comprehended except through the symbol of the ruler. 2
This idolatrous worship of the ruler will seem irrational to
modern men; but it certainly did not err in one direction any
more than the social contract theory erred in the other. For
in one sense it was merely reverence for established authority
and order which was recognized to be beyond the wit and
wisdom of any particular generation. It was therefore prov-
identially established. The ruler was believed to have some
kinship with the creator of the cosmic order.

This religious attitude toward government made it diffi-
cult to realize that a government which did not have the ex-
plicit consent of its subjects was bound to be unjust. But
the attitude was justified by the fact that government, purely
by explicit consent, was, at least in that day, impossible. It

2 Cf. H. E. Frankfort: Kingship of the Gods,

ORGANISM AND ARTIFACT IN DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 169

may, much to the horror of our simpler idealists, be impos-
sible today, which is why one of the greatest achievements
of statecraft was to distinguish between the implicit consent
which we give to an established government, if it is fairly
tolerable, and a particular government, which is made and
unmade by explicit consent. This is the ideal way of uniting
the wisdom of traditional with that of voluntaristic societies.

The religious reverence for established order is not created
by priests, but it can be manipulated and corrupted by them.
It springs up spontaneously wherever men appreciate an
order that they could not have created. It is, in short, the
chief ingredient of the state's "majesty/* Majesty is certainly
a more important source of authority than power, though no
state can exist without the police power to suppress overt
recalcitrance. But the possession of majesty spells the differ-
ence between legitimate and illegitimate government, that is,
between the government which rules by implicit consent or
that which rules by "force and fraud/' 3

The ingredients of majesty are chiefly three: (a) historic
prestige, symbolized in the principle of legitimacy in all
monarchies; (b) the religious aura, derived either from the
sense of the divinity of the monarch or (within Christian
terms) his divine ordination to rule; and (c) the moral pres-
tige derived from the justice of his reign. Usurpation does
not necessarily destroy this moral prestige of the ruler if his
rule is just enough to overcome the original resentment against
his conquest and to validate itself by the order achieved in
the conquest. Most of the ancient empires were in fact unified
by the triumph of one city-state over the others. If there
were enough forces of cohesion beside the pure force, the
attained unity could validate itself without "force and fraud/'
Though there may have been some fraud in the manipula-
tion of religious texts by the priests of Heliopolis, Memphis
or Babylon for the purpose of proving the God of the regnant
city-state to be the supreme God of the world.

3 Cf. Guglielmo Ferrero: Principles of Power.

270 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

The religious element of Western civilization was distin-
guished markedly in some respects, and less markedly in
some others, from that of the ancient pagan empires. The
idolatrous worship of the ruler was of course impossible within
the rigorous monotheistic framework of Biblical religion. But
the religious sanctity claimed for the papal ruler of the whole
European culture was regarded by its imperial and other
critics as idolatrous long before the Reformation levelled the
shocking charge that the Pope was "anti-Christ." The grada-
tion of authority in the medieval system was in fact one of
those peculiar historical configurations which may be end-
lessly justified by rational argument but for which only the
unique contingencies of history can account. It represents
a quite novel co-operation between priest and soldier in the
management of an imperium in which the priest was supreme,
though Empire and Church were constant competitors for
the primacy of power. The competition was partly responsible
for the disintegration of the medieval system, the papacy ulti-
mately requiring the help of the budding nations (chiefly
France) as counterweight against the Empire. But the servant
became the master of the Papacy, and a long schism resulted
(Captivity of Avignon) .

But the hazards of political maneuver were certainly not
as responsible for the decline of the authority of the Papacy
as the mounting resentment against the policy of using the
"keys of heaven," excommunication and interdict, to unlock
the doors of temporal power.

The devout Dante had expressed the growing resentment
against this peculiar mixture of the spiritual and the political
long before the Reformation. The universality of this resent-
ment (which incidentally still colors the political life of the
Western world) justifies the judgement that the decay of the
authority of the medieval papacy was inevitable. Certainly
the primary cause of this decay was religious resentment,
though it can not be denied that all the reformers and pre-
reformers, Huss, Luther, Knox were national heroes; and
that the rising nations insinuated nationalistic resentments

ORGANISM AND ARTIFACT IN DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT

against imperial rule into the religious protest against the
quality of that rule.

It may be significant that competition for political author-
ity made the Church more critical of political power than
of the social stratification of society. "Kings have their do-
minion by perfidy and plunder/' said the first great Pope,
Gregory I. But it would be unfair to attribute this critical
attitude merely to political competition. To do so would miss
the point which we are about to elaborate. That is that the
Reformation, in its early stages at least, represented retro-
gression in political morality because of the uncritical rever-
ence which it gave to historically and "providentially" estab-
lished political authority.

The creative relation of Protestantism to the emerging
"free" society rests primarily on its challenge to the keystone
of the arch of authority in the medieval structure, the Church.
But in terms of the problem which we are now considering:
how to relate explicit to implicit consent and how to pre-
serve reverence for order and yet be critical of the authority,
which is at the basis of the order, we must admit that the
Reformation destroyed, at least in its early phases, the im-
pressive constitutionalism of the medieval Church. This was
partly due to the fact that it relaxed the criticism of political
institutions upon the basis of their conformity to natural
law. This simply meant that order was not subjected to the
criterion of its capacity for justice. Norms taken from Scrip-
ture were substituted for the natural law, but scriptural
norms were frequently capricious. Certainly the Pauline ad-
monition: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.
For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are
ordained of God/* (Romans 13:1) was given a most onesided
emphasis in the whole of Reformation thought, and served
to make the religious appreciation of providentially estab-
lished order excessive to the point of prohibiting resistance
to any established authority whether good or evil.

Both Luther and Calvin insisted on the duty of obedience
even to unjust rulers. This attitude stands in sharp contrast to

172 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

Aquinas* justification of tyrannicide. A good deal of political
history was made when John Knox extricated Calvinism
from a too uncritical application of this single word of Scrip^
ture, which incidentally, taken alone, disturbs the scriptural
"consensus" by eliminating all the critical words on the in
justice of rulers from the prophets to Jesus. "The power in
that place," declared John Knox, "is not to be taken as the
unjust commandments of men but as the just commandments
of God." When asked whether it was right for the people to
judge the justice of the ruler he answered, "and what harm
would a commonwealth receive if the corrupt affections of
ignorant rulers were moderated and bridled by the wisdom
and discretion of Godly subjects?" Thus the camel's nose of
democracy entered the tent of the Reformation for the first
time.

The whole history of Europe might have been different
had it not required three more centuries before Lutheranisin,
prompted by Hitler's tyranny, found the same avenue of
escape from the binding force of the Pauline admonition
which Knox had found. It was the simple realization that only
rulers "who are not a terror to good works but to evil"
deserve obedience.

It could not have been scriptural authority alone which
would have created this excessive reverence for the state
(which incidentally was no more sharply defined by Luther
than Obngkeit) . All the early Reformers had a great fear of
anarchy, expressed rather hysterically by Luther against the
pathetic peasants who had vainly tried to exploit the new
religious freedom for social ends. The fear of anarchy was
vividly expressed by Tyndale: "It is better," he said, "to
have a tyrant for a king than a shadow ... for a tyrant,
though he do wrong unto the good, yet he punisheth the evil
and maketh all men obey. ... A king who is soft as silk
and effeminate . . . shall be more grievous to the realm than
a right tyrant." 4

* From Obedience of a Christian Man, p. 1528.

ORGANISM AND ARTIFACT IN DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 173

Calvin derives the prohibition of resistance even to tyrants
from the Scripture, though he does not define the specific
source: "If we direct our attention to the word of God/' he
writes in the Institutes, "it will (persuade us) even to submit
to the government, not only of those princes who discharge
their duties to us with becoming integrity and fidelity, but
to all who possess sovereignty, even though they perform
none of the duties of their function. For though the Lord
testifies that the magistrate is an eminent gift of his liberality,
to preserve the safety of men, and prescribes to magistrates
themselves the extent of their duties, yet he at the same time
declares that, whatever their characters, they have their gov-
ernment only from him; that those who govern for the public
good are true specimens and mirrors of his beneficence; and
that all who rule in an unjust and tyrannical manner are
raised up by him to punish the iniquity of the people; that
all possess that sacred majesty with which he invested legiti-
mate authority." 5

Calvin's pretension in speaking in God's name with such
confidence, and his suggestion that unjust rule may be justified
as a punishment for the sins of the people, would seem to
accentuate indiscriminate reverence for political authority at
the precise moment in history where discriminate judgement
became most necessary. In short, Luther and Calvin raised
religious reverence for political authority to an absurd height.
Thus the Reformation in its early stages purged Christian
thought of its Catholic discriminations and set it at the op-
posite pole of the rationalists, who had no reverence for his-
torically evolved integrations of authority at all, and pro-
pounded the equally absurd doctrine of the "social contract"
which was born of the illusion that each generation had it in
its power to make and unmake both communities and govern-
ments.

Considerable history was required to close the gap between
these two poles and to prove both attitudes, purged of their

s John Calvin: Institutes, Book IV, Chapter xx, p. 25.

174 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

extremism, to be necessary for the creation of a community
which would enjoy both stability and justice. The poles of
early modernity were, in fact, so far apart that the Catholics
may be excused if they ask why it would not be well to con-
sider the disintegration of the medieval synthesis a mistake
and seek a return to the original unity. The answer to that
question is that it is not possible for modern culture and
civilization with all of its vitalities, economic and political
and cultural, to find unity under clerical authoritarianism.
Not only is the clericalism and the authoritarianism impos-
sible, but the norms by which life was regulated are too
inflexible. Whether it was the theory of a "just price" which
defined the norm for economic life, or the concept of a "just
prince" which outlawed tyranny, or the idea of a "just war"
which gave the criteria for legitimate conflict, the standards
were in every case too inflexible and simple to define the
moral norm in the contingencies of history. The problem of
modern culture is to recognize the contingencies but not
despair of sensing the norms of justice, though they may not
be defined with the precision which medieval "natural law"
attempted.

The contradiction between an excessive reverence for au-
thority and an excessive voluntarism, which imagined each
generation to have the power to create order and justice in
the community by a fiat of its own will, was most suc-
cessfully overcome in the Calvinism of the seventeenth cen-
tury.

The right of resistance to unjust government was affirmed
by the simple expedient of asserting that the rule of a prince
assumed a "covenant" between the ruler and the ruled which
was violated by injustice. "It is certain," we read in the
memorable anonymous Huguenot tract Vindiciae Contra
Tyrannos, "that the people require a performance of cove-
nants. The people ask the king whether he will rule justly.
He promises he will. Then the people answer, and not before,
that they will obey faithfully. The king promises, the which
failing to be accomplished, the people are quit of their prom-

ORGANISM AND ARTIFACT IN DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 175

ises." Thus the idea of a mutual covenant, which could be
violated by the injustice o the ruler and was therefore not
violated in the first instance by resistance to injustice of the
rulers, was born. That idea brushed out the early Reformation
idea of a binding covenant of obedience between God and the
people, which enjoined obedience, or at least non-resistance,
whether the ruler be evil or good. "There is an oath between
the king and the people," said the Scottish Calvinist consti-
tutionalist Samuel Rutherford, in his memorable Lex, Rex,
'laid on by a reciprocation of hands, mutual civil obligations,
of the king to the people and the people to the king." Ruther-
ford simply expanded the opening, first proposed by John
Knox to stop the fateful influence of Romans 13. "If any
cast off the nature of a king and become a tyrant/' he de-
clared simply, "his office is not from God." It would be inter-
esting to examine how much wisdom of this later Calvinism
was acquired by historical experience, and how the certainties
about the God-ordained quality of all government evaporated
in the conflict of Protestants with Catholic monarchs.

However, the real achievement of later Calvinism was in
distinguishing between the fact of government, which is not in
the competence of any generation to create out of hand, and
a particular government, which rests upon explicit consent.
"It is not in men's free will to have government or no gov-
ernment," declared Sam Rutherford, "or to obey or not
to obey the acts of the court of nature which is God's court.
But we must distinguish between the power of government,
and the power of government by magistracy . . . the latter
the people must measure ounce by ounce-weights, no more
and no less." Providentially ordained government and political
order neither ordains monarchy nor any one particular mon-
arch. "The essence of government is kept safe in aristocracy
or democracy," declared Rutherford, "though there be no
kings." To the question, "whether this man or that man be
crowned King," Rutherford answered "the people have the
power" to determine.

Thus a balance was reached between proper reverence for

176 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

the ordinance of government and affirmation of the principle
of consent by which particular governments are made and
unmade; between the conception of the community as an
organism and as an artifact; between the factors which are
beyond the power, and those within the power of a given
generation. This balance is also creative of a government with
a maximum of stability and a maximum of justice. The
former created by traditional forces and the latter by the
workings of a democratic order in which the people measure
out "ounce by ounce-weights" the power which they wish
to entrust to a particular ruler.

It is this balance which has made constitutional monarchy
so serviceable an instrument of democracy in the healthier
West European states long after the institution of monarchy
was relegated to the scrap heap of history by the rationalistic
idealists of the eighteenth century. The monarchy, shorn of
its power, proved to be a very good symbol of the continuities
of order and authority beyond the majesty of any particular
governments.

Our own nation has achieved stability without the use of this
symbol, though we are frequently embarrassed by the fact
that the symbolic head of the entire nation is also a party
leader, subject to the changing estimates of party loyalties.
Perhaps it is this defect in a symbol for the "organic" aspects
of government which makes us so hysterical in our insistence
that there shall be no disloyalty to our government. For one
of the great achievements of democracy was certainly to have
incorporated resistance to a particular government into the
very structure of government itself. This does not of course
preclude revolution whenever the tradition of government in
a nation becomes so discredited by the actions of particular
governments that the resentments, which generate revolutions,
are aroused. But on the whole the democracies which had
modified the power of the monarchy to some extent before
the twentieth century were able to preserve the monarchial
symbol for democratic purposes. Monarchies with absolutistic
pretension, or vestigial remnants of absolution, on the other

ORGANISM AND ARTIFACT IN DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 177

hand, perished in the First World War. Even constitutional
monarchies, in which the monarch connived with totalitarian
parties, succumbed in the Second World War.

If there is to be an ideal fusion of freedom with stability,
of justice with order, and of democratic experimentation with
tradition, it is of course necessary that the symbols of sta-
bility should not be used as weapons of the parties of privi-
lege to preserve a traditional privilege against the will of the
majority. If the symbol is to remain untarnished as a symbol
of the unity of the community above party conflict and of the
continuing majesty of its government, any party in the com-
munity must have the confidence that it may, upon attaining
a majority for its conception of justice, be able to speak
through the royal symbol. This is to say that it achieves the
right to speak for the whole community, though it is only
a majority of the community. There must also be a cor-
responding respect by the majority of the rights of the minor-
ity. Otherwise a frustrated minority may become desperate
and defy this attempt at national unity.

In British history it is significant that constitutional mon-
archy which Edmund Burke extolled so eloquently as an
instrument of justice in countering the illusions of the French
Revolution 6 actually had more power in his day to frustrate
the will of the majority than a rising democracy found suf-
ferable. The monarchy was gradually shorn of its power, not
by revolution but by organic historical processes, that is to
say, by the gradual extension of the logic inherent in the
democratic idea. This process in British history was not com-
plete until a very recent day when George V refused to create
enough Peers to provide a conservative majority in the House
of Lords for the purpose of defeating the ruling government.

In our own nation the Constitution takes the place of
the monarchy as the symbol of stability and continuing
majesty of government. Though it does not have the ad-
vantages of combining flexibility with inflexibility, it is sig-
nificant that there are evidences of an organic growth of

e Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France

178 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

extended democracy upon it. The most significant of these
is the relegation of the Electoral College to powerlessness. It
had been prompted by the fear of the founding fathers of the
unmediated expression of the popular will, which proved to
be unfounded. Perhaps the development of the party struc-
tures and party conventions, also not anticipated in the Con-
stitution, hastened the relegation of the Electoral College to
the status of an archaic remnant. The fear of the founding
fathers of the divisiveness of "factions," i.e., parties, also
proved to be unfounded.

It should be added that the institution of constitutional
monarchy was itself a product of the "providential" force
in history which it came to symbolize. It was not what the
monarchists intended nor what the anti-monarchist demo-
crats intended. But it incorporated a political wisdom, higher
than the intentions of either party. It is thus a perfect illus-
tration of the way that truth may come out of the competition
of contrasting errors. In this case the truth was a fusion of the
factors of stability and those of freedom and justice. If con-
stitutional monarchy is a potent, though not a solitary, sym-
bol of the wisdom which combines stability with freedom,
we may assume that the nations of Western Europe, which
have retained this type of monarchial institution, have some
measure of this wisdom. They also required a considerable
measure of historical good fortune to escape the hazards
incident upon the disintegration of a traditional society.

But whatever their several merits, it can not be denied that
Britain is the most exemplary exponent of the wisdom which
combines reverence for historical integrations of community
and authority with a rational and voluntaristic discrimination
of the factors and forces which make for freedom and justice
in the complexities of a technical society. Britain was able
to absorb the bourgeois revolution into an essentially tra-
ditional society, to pour the new wine into the old wine
skins without bursting them. It was able after that achieve-
ment to absorb the second democratic movement of the indus-
trial workers, and to return to the conditions of a modified

ORGANISM AND ARTIFACT IN DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 179

welfare state when the panacea of the socialization of prop-
erty proved inadequate in overcoming the collective poverty
of a war-impoverished nation and when it proved to be un-
necessary in view of the measures of justice which had been
accomplished without socialization.

Such a measure of stability and freedom to experiment
points to real treasuries of political wisdom. If we compare
the British achievements with those of France and Germany,
for instance, it may not be too hazardous to suggest that
these two nations may be inferior because one was formed
politically by Luther's extravagant reverence for political
authority and the other is the product of the illusions of the
Enlightenment and of Rousseauistic romanticism. In either
case, the one or the other ingredient of the compound of
reverence for history and rational discrimination was lacking.

George Santayana pays eloquent tribute to the British
genius for establishing liberty within the framework of sta-
bility. "The slow co-operation of free men, this liberty in
democracy," he declares, "is wholly English. In its personal
basis, its reserve, its tenacity, its empiricism, its public spirit
and in the assurance of its own Tightness it deserves to be
called English, to whatever countries it may spread." 7

The wisdom which combines the two approaches runs from
Ireton through Edmund Burke to Winston Churchill. Ireton
preferred the "rights of Englishmen" to the "rights of man."
That phrase incorporates an awareness that rationally con-
ceived "rights" are not very secure, even if defined as "inalien-
able," if they have not been acknowledged in the living
community; and that the inordinancy of the ambitions of
fellow men, which imperils our rights, are checked with more
effect by historical habit than by appeals to reason. For each
party is so intransigeant in Its claims precisely because it
regards them as "rational."

The capacity to absorb the ferment of democratic justice

7 George Santayana: Character and Opinion in the United States,
p. 195.

ISO THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

without bursting the wineskins of a traditional society may
be partly due to the peculiar history of sectarian Christianity
in England. The "Schwaermer/' the Anabaptist of the Con-
tinent, projected wholly perfectionist and fantastic goals for
society. They were defeated by Protestant and Catholic con-
servatives and left no deposit in the life and thought of the
Continent. All the radical sects on the left wing of Cromwell's
army were addicted to almost as fantastic perfectionism as the
Anabaptists. They were also defeated. But their life and
thought left a deposit which became the basis for subsequent
democratic developments. Perhaps the difference was that
while their ideas and ideals were extremist and perfectionist,
they did not cease to be relevant. They provided the counter-
weight of criticism o established authority to the traditional
reverence for authority.

Richard Hooker, at the turn from the sixteenth to the
seventeenth century, was able to mix this democratic ferment
with the old wine with a balance which was superior even
to that of the later Calvinists. He thus became the most
expressive symbol of English political philosophy, the re-
flective exponent of a compromise between Protestant and
Catholic forces, unrefiectively achieved under Queen Eliza-
beth, and the potent source of the balanced thought which
prevented the restoration after Cromwell's adventure from
being a mere return to the past.

Hooker's political genius was based on his awareness of
the relation of implicit to explicit consent. He knew that
government without consent means tyranny. But he also knew
that the principle of the "consent of the governed" as pro-
pounded by the Christian, as later by the rationalistic, ideal-
ists was too simply conceived to do justice to the implicit
consent which accrues to relatively just governments through
historical achievement. "Laws there are not, which public
approbation has not made so," he declared. But he also knew
that assent is frequently indirect rather than direct. "In many
things/' he continued, "assent is given, they that give it, not
imagining that they do so because the manner of their

ORGANISM AND ARTIFACT IN DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 181

giving Is not apparent." 8 It Is particularly important to jus-
tify the Inheritance of good laws from previous generations.
For, argued Hooker, "The act of public society, done five
hundred years ago, standeth as theirs who are presently of
the same society, because corporations are immortal/'

It is a tribute to Hooker's genius and to his representative
character in British political thought, that both John Locke
and Edmund Burke were indebted to him.

Immediately the issue solved by Hooker and the later Cal-
vinists is how to relate the freedom and justice of a demo-
cratic society to the organic stabilities of a more traditional
society. This requires that new and more adequate equilibria
of power be substituted for the disbalances which created
injustice. It also requires replacing too conventional accept-
ance of traditional authority with discriminate judgement
about the actual consequences of given policies in the life
of the community.

But more ultimately considered, this political problem is
merely a version of the more general problem of how man is
to be aware of his status as both creator and creature in his-
tory. If he forgets that he is a creature and imagines himself
purely a creator, he will lack reverence for the achievements
of the past, which are beyond his competence, and for the
mysterious providence under which an order has been estab-
lished which blesses his life. Heedless of past achievements
and unable to profit by past lessons, he will gaily build new
societies only to find them subject to worse corruptions than
the traditional ones. Thus the dreams of the seventeenth-
century Christian sectaries culminated in Cromwell's dicta-
torship; the dreams of the French Encyclopedists culminated
in Napoleon's adventures and despotism; and the Marxist
dreams turned into the nightmare of Stalinism.

These miscalculations resulted from the failure to take ac-
count of the persistent impulses of self-interest which would
express themselves in new historical configurations. It was

s Richard Hooker: Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

182 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

alstf due to the fact that past injustices had obscured the
positive contribution of traditional societies in restraining
self-interest by historically established norms and by setting
limits to the inordinate ambitions of men.

On the other hand, if man does not acknowledge his status
as creator, his freedom over the historical flux, his right and
duty to challenge the inherited traditions of the community,
his obligation to exercise discriminate judgement in rear-
ranging or reconstructing any scheme of togetherness which
has been faulty in providing justice, he will merely become
the victim of the past which accentuates its vices when it is
studiedly preserved into the present.

He will have an undue reverence which will be particularly
obnoxious in a civilization in which the emergence of new
factors and dynamics makes the extension and the preserva-
tion of justice dependent upon discriminate judgement.

Freedom over the traditions of the past and discriminate
judgement in weighing the relative factors and forces which
effect the establishment of community and the attainment
of justice become particularly important in the extension of
community to global dimensions, the task which now confronts
mankind, and in organizing the economic relations below
the level of the minimal integration of the community. This
latter problem we have suggested as related to the problem,
of government, but not to be identified with it. We must now
consider it more specifically.

Chapter 21

PROPERTY, SOCIAL HIERARCHY AND
THE PROBLEM OF JUSTICE

W,

e have provisionally considered both prop-
erty and social stratification as instruments, with government,
of the integration of the community but have dismissed them
provisionally in order to center our attention upon the prob-
lem of government and justice. We must now study these
"institutions" more carefully, both in their relatedness and
separately. The definition of "institution" is correct for prop-
erty; but it is dubious for describing the hierarchy of author-
ity and the consequent social stratification below the level of
government which characterizes all forms of communal inte-
gration. These phenomena are not so much institutions as
aspects of the communal life. If we define them as "below
the level of government," we can do this only tentatively.
For all subordination of life to leadership in the various
activities of the community Is in a sense "government,"
though pluralistic and democratic communities have under-
stood how to create independent centers of authority without
relating them to state authority. The establishment of grades
of authority inevitably leads to social stratification because
grades of privilege invariably are related to grades of author-
ity and power. Property is related to this stratification because
it is the primary instrument for transmitting authority and

184 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

privilege from generation to generation. It is this function
of property which makes the institution morally so ambigu-
ous. For property, as the consequence of mixing our labor
with nature (John Locke) and property as the right of in-
heriting power and privilege, are certainly in different cate-
gories of moral legitimacy.

But the fact is that not only property, but the two institu-
tions of property and social stratification are in the same
position of moral ambiguity. Both are necessary instruments
of justice and order, and yet both are fruitful of injustice.
Both have, no less than government, grown up organically in
traditional civilizations in the sense that they were uncon-
scious adaptations to the needs of justice and order. Both
were, even as government, productive of injustice. The injus-
tice is inevitable because the economic and other privileges
attendant upon special function tended to be in excess of the
necessities of the function performed. Both institutions con-
tinued for millenia until the dissolution of the medieval order
in Western Europe. The revolts against both of them by both
the radical Christians and the radical secular idealists of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tended to be indis-
criminate. This lack of discrimination expressed itself in the
notion that liberty and equality were simple possibilities in
history.

We therefore have the task in a mobile and technically effi-
cient society to come to terms with the necessities which have
created both phenomena, for these necessities are indeed
perennial; but to apply the regulative principles of liberty
and equality so that they will be more effective than in the
older organic societies but will not be regarded as simple
possibilities as the radical rebels against a traditional society
regarded them. In performing this task we must be aware
that the detailed adjustments between the necessities of sub-
ordination and leadership and the principles of equality and
liberty are the product of historical growth and of adjustment
to highly contingent power realities.

A preliminary word must be said about the economic and
political situation in traditional civilization which generated

PROPERTY, SOCIAL HIERARCHY AND JUSTICE 1S5

the resentments expressed in so vehement a protest. It was a
Christian civilization which suffered and nourished the social
Inequalities of feudal civilization. This culture was well aware
that the principles of equality and liberty were regulative. Yet
It was more, rather than less, complacent about them than
it was about government, though the latter had a higher moral
legitimacy, being more necessary to the order of the com-
munity. We have previously noted that political competition
between the Church and the political authorities may have
been the cause of this more rigorous criticism. But the re-
ligious Imagination easily accepts a status quo as normative
and tries merely to perfect the moral realities of the struc-
ture by personal love in individual relations. Therefore, the
Medieval Church was not peculiar in its policy of accepting
the hierarchical structure of medieval society. However it
accentuated its vices by sanctifying Its Inequalities in terms
of its principles of "natural law." The inequalities seemed
to correspond exactly to the view of Aristotle and to the
patriarchal social organization enshrined in the Old Testa-
ment. It Is significant however that the Medieval Church did
not have the ethical Insight of Hebrew prophetism, which
castigated the Injustice of the rulers of Israel so rigorously.
Of course, the Christian was encouraged to be loving within
and beyond the requirements of justice as established by the
status quo. This counsel produced the sentimentalities of the
"lady bountiful/* who issued from the castle periodically to
give succour to the poor. On a much higher level it also
created the tradition of noblesse oblige which has perma-
nently influenced the ethos of the European aristocracy and
given it a more humane outlook than that of the new com-
mercial and industrial owners. These failures and accom-
plishments are significant for an understanding of the relation
of love, the keystone and core of Christian morality, to the
realities of social justice. The fact that love was frequently
used to cover up and to excuse social injustice has given the
very word "charity" a bad connotation in the lexicon o
modernity. It proves indeed that love in its purest form may
not be as immediately relevant as either equality or liberty to

186 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

the issue of establishing justice within the social structures
and traditions of the community. But if love means wanting
the welfare of the neighbor, it can never be irrelevant to any
social situation. If love is defined exclusively in terms of
attitudes which can express themselves only in personal re-
lations, as it is frequently defined by Christians (and inci-
dentally more consistently so by Protestants than by Catho-
lics) , it becomes irrelevant to any situation in which struc-
tures of justice must become instruments of love. Further-
more, love may easily be corrupted, so that a powerful man
will use benevolence in personal relations as a substitute of
granting justice in the basic organization of life. For in
benevolence he displays his power with his goodness while
justice challenges his power as incompatible with goodness.
These facts are withheld from the wise but they are known
by the "simple," particularly if they should be the victims
of the "benevolence'* of the powerful. Resentment against
these hypocrisies are the root of the laboring man's objection
to "paternalism." These corruptions can not however obscure
the fact that it is always possible for the love or the self-love
of individuals to perfect or to spoil even the most ideal struc-
ture of justice. Though nothing could redeem slavery, or
serfdom for that matter, as a structure of justice, yet this
does not change the fact that it was a matter of life or death
on occasion whether a slave or serf had a benevolent or cruel
master.

Medieval Christianity, in short, contributed to the social
resentments which engulfed the social structure of feudalism
by its complacency about social inequality. But in this, as in
the instance of government, the Reformation initially worsened
the situation. Luther was certainly as indiscriminate in deal-
ing with the social desires of the peasants as he was in exalting
political authority. This distinction had the fantastic effect
of making suffering and sacrificial love the norm for the poor
victim of injustice, while encouraging the beneficiaries of
injustice to a rather cruel suppression in the name of order.
"You will not bear that any one inflict evil and injustice
upon you . . . But want to be free and suffer only freedom

PROPERTY, SOCIAL HIERARCHY AND JUSTICE 187

and complete justice," wrote Luther to the revolting peasants.
He argued with them that their resistance to injustice was
not in conformity with their "rights" as Christians, for Christ
had enjoined complete non-resistance in the Sermon on the
Mount. In other words he made a perfectionist ethic com-
pletely irrelevant to the struggle for justice. Samuel Ruther-
ford corrected the logic of this perfectionism a century later
with the simple affirmation: "Resistance is in the children of
God an innocent act of self-preservation, no less than is
patient suffering." Luther's admonition of non-resistance for
the poor peasants was in striking contrast to his intemperate
advice to the princes to beat down the peasant rebellion:
"Stab, hit, kill here whoever you can," he said, "for nothing
can be more poisonous, deadly and devilish than a revolu-
tionary ... It does not help the peasants that they claim
Genesis I and II that all things were created free and common
and that all were equally baptised. For in the New Testament
Moses counts for nothing, but there stands our Master Christ
and casts us with body and possessions under Caesar's and the
worldly law, when he says 'give unto Caesar the things that
are Caesar's/ " 1

This rather violent dualism which gives the feudal lord
the benefit of an ethic of order bereft of a sense of justice,
and enforces an ethic of love upon the poor peasant equally
bereft of a demand for justice was, of course, part of the
radical dualism implied in the doctrine of the "two realms."
In the history of social thought it is significant only in
revealing how rigorously the early Reformation attempted to
preserve the medieval structure despite, or probably because,
it challenged the keystone of its arch of authority. In the
history of Christianity it is significant because it reveals a
permanent embarrassment of Christian thought in making
the final insights into the destiny of the individual relevant
to the problems of ordering the life of the community with
tolerable justice. Luther was as wrong in making love com-
pletely irrelevant to the issues of justice as subsequently

i Martin Luther: Werke Gesammtousgabe Weimar, Vol. 18, p. 361.

188 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

liberal Christianity was in holding love to be a simple his-
torical and social possibility.

If Luther accentuated the problem of establishing justice
within the organic and traditional hierarchies of the com-
munity, the general tendency upon the dissolution of the
medieval culture was to condemn these hierarchies completely
because they violated the law of love and the principles of
liberty and equality.

The radical Christian sects, the Anabaptists of the sixteenth
century against whom Luther fulminated, the left-wing sec-
taries of Cromwell's army in the seventeenth century, and the
philosophers of pre-r evolutionary France were of one voice
in their moral condemnation of the hierarchical structure of
medieval society, and in their belief that freedom and equality
were simple historical possibilities. They have therefore cre-
ated an ethos in modern culture which does not know how
to come to terms with the facts and the moral necessities
involved in the organic growth of social hierarchies.

"Men and women," declared the Leveller leader John Lil-
burne, "are by nature equal and alike in power, dignity, au-
thority and majesty, none of them having by nature any
authority or dominion or magisterial power, one over and
above the other. Neither have they or can exercise any but
merely by institution or donation, that is to say by mutual
agreement and consent, given, derived or assumed for the
good benefit and comfort of each other and not for the hurt,
damage or mischief of any." 2

The embryo of the later social contract theory of com-
munity is obviously in this reasoning. It is a Christian version
of Rousseau's dictum that "Men are born free but are now
everywhere in chains." These rebels against traditional social
hierarchies were right in condemning the injustices of a feudal
order. They were wrong in supposing that it would be pos-
sible to organize society without a social hierarchy.

Edmund Burke spoke eloquently about the effects of this
rigorous equalitarianism in the French Revolution. They were

2 John Lilbume: Free Man's Freedom Vindicated, 1646.

PROPERTY, SOCIAL HIERARCHY AND JUSTICE 189

identical in his opinion with the devastation wrought by
a cruel conqueror. "Acting as conquerors," he wrote, "they
have imitated the policy of the harshest of that harsh race . . .
to produce general poverty to put up their properties for
auction; to crush their princes, nobles and pontiffs; to lay low
everything that had lifted its head above the level, or which
could serve to combine or rally a people in their distresses.
. . . They have made France free in the same manner in
which those sincere friends of the rights of mankind, the
Romans, had freed Greece, Macedon and other nations." 3

This observation by one who resisted the abstract dogmas
of the idealists because he had discerned the wisdom in the
organic developments of history, astutely describes the devas-
tating effect upon a community of the dogmas of idealistic
revolutionists. They "lay low everything that has lifted up
his head." In other words, they destroy the organic integra-
tions of community in the fierce resolve to conform the order
of the community to standards of justice.

The Russian Revolution must be regarded as a kind of
second chapter of the French Revolution, which logically
completed some issues toward which the French Revolution
had vague or ambiguous attitudes. It had exactly the same
effect upon society. In both cases the inequalities which
developed in the new society, grown upon the debris left by
the destruction of the old society, proved to be more insuf-
ferable than those of the old because the balances of power
were even more defective than those of the traditional society.
(Igor Gouzenko gives a devastating account of the moral
realities embodied in the new Russian oligarchy in his Fall
of a Titan.)

If we take Luther's complete rejection of the relevancy
of the pinnacles of the Christian ethic of love to any social
situation, involving permanent structures, on the one hand,
and, on the other, the conviction of liberal Christianity that
love is a simple norm for communal integration and the
similar conviction of the French, and subsequently of the

s Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France, E. P. Button
Edition, p. 179.

190 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

Russian Revolution, that liberty or equality, either or both,
are simply attainable norms for society, we have the moral
predicament of Western Christian civilization about the
integration of its communities in a nutshell. Its norms taken
not as ultimately regulative, but as immediately relevant,
destroy community by levelling all those organic forms of
integration by which a community organizes its life. On the
other hand, an unreflective and complacent attitude toward
these forms of social hierarchy causes their injustices to reach
monstrous proportions.

We have been tentatively tolerant toward the vehemence
expressed in revolutionary resentments because we believed
that resentments against injustice were justified, as indeed they
were. But we failed to recognize the fact that these resent-
ments generated quite untenable social philosophies, blind
to the problem of social integration. These philosophies pre-
served nihilistic social policies long after the original revo-
lutionary vehemence had abated. This miscalculation con-
tributed to the original tolerance of the "liberal" world
to the excesses of the Russian Revolution. Was it not destroy-
ing injustices about which all "liberals" had a sensitive con-
science; and would it not begin to be creative after it had
broken all the eggs which must be broken to make an
omelette?

These miscalculations are understandable enough. But
meanwhile there are some very obtrusive evidences of the
perennial nature of these social hierarchies in our daily life
which we might have heeded with more astuteness had we
not been blinded by dogmatic presuppositions about the de-
mands of "nature," of "reason" and of "love."

Beginning with the family, we know of integrations of the
community in which power and competence are the levers
of authority to subordinate some men to others. Conserva-
tives have generally derived explicit analogies from the author-
ity of the father in order to justify monarchy. John Locke
spent most of his polemic fire upon this analogy in his Two
Essays on Civil Government. But the conservatives were cer-
tainly in closer accord with history than the social contract

PROPERTY, SOCIAL HIERARCHY AND JUSTICE 191

theorists who posited a wholly mythical "state of nature/'
The family is indeed the embryo of all social integration.
Love and power are more coordinate in its organization than
in any other. One might sentimentally define our whole social
problem as an effort to reconstitute the co-ordination of love
and power in the larger communities which obtained in the
family. In this sense the various myths of the "Fall" as
identical with the rise of civilization are expressive.

Of course the family does not perfectly co-ordinate power
and love. Modern women had to wait upon the independent
economic power given them by a technical civilization before
they could challenge the unjust dominance of the male in
traditional society.

Most children feel the power of the parents to be unjust
when they reach the rebellion of adolescence. They may be
right or wrong in their several rebellions, depending upon
the character of their parents. But they are usually more
right than their parents can realize in suspecting that power
impulses have been subtly compounded with love in the
motives of their parents, and that the justice which their
parents mete out is least sufferable if the parents are wholly
unconscious of this mixture of motives.

Above the level of the family we meet the pattern of
integration and co-ordination of life through subordination
on every hand; schools with more than one teacher have a
"principal"; and school systems with more than one school
have a "superintendent"; churches are supervised by a bishop.
The extreme congregational polity of sectarian Churches,
which is the counterpart in the religious community of the
libertarianism and equalitarianism of the modern age, was
modified by experience; and the modification was obscured
by giving the effective bishops the title of "superintendent."
The industrial life of the nation is integrated from factory
foreman to superintendent, to manager to owner. We must
speak about the significance of the authority of the owner
presently though it is relevant immediately to observe that
the owner is not so potent and the manager more potent
than Marxist theory assumed.

192 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

In every sphere of life this integration of the community
through social hierarchy proved necessary and inevitable,
however much the Christian conscience, in either its tra-
ditional or secularized variety, protested against it. And in
every case these hierarchies of authority tended to be unjust,
power and authority tending to arrogate more privilege to
itself than its functions warranted. Thus the criticisms which
frequently resulted in the abolitions seemed to be justified.
But the abolitions were never justified.

If we have gained a tolerable justice in modern society
despite these confusions, it is because the wisdom proceeding
from common experience and from the welter of social compe-
titions has been wiser than that of either the conservatives
who justified both social hierarchy and its unjust privileges,
and the radicals who sought to abolish both. To justify this
thesis it will be necessary to examine two correlations which
we have presented rather uncritically: the correlations between
liberty and equality and between property and social hier-
archy.

In both seventeenth-century English sectarianism and in
eighteenth-century rationalism there was a confused identifica-
tion between liberty and equality, and an equally confused
supposition that the primary cause of inequality was prop-
erty. In England the "Levellers" and "Diggers" were equally
libertarian and equalitarian. But it was the Digger leader
Gerrard Winstanley who anticipated modern Marxism in
calling for a socialization of property. Unlike Marx, he at-
tributed property to government rather than attributing the
rise of government to the motive of safeguarding property,
which was the thesis in Marx's thought, "The oppression of
kingly governments has made this age to desire common-
wealth government," he wrote, "and the removal of kings, for
the spirit of light in man loves freedom and hates bondage." 4
But the purpose of commonwealth government was the res-

4 Gerrard Winstanley: The Law of Freedom on a Platform; or True
Magistracy Restored.

PROPERTY, SOCIAL HIERARCHY AND JUSTICE 193

toration of a supposedly primeval common ownership. "When
the earth becomes a common treasury again as it must, the
enmity of ail lands will cease. For no one shall dare to seek
dominion over others; neither shall any dare to kill another
or desire more of the earth than another." 5

Wmstanley in his more orthodox moods ascribed the be-
ginning of evil to the rise of "particular love," to supplant
the "universal love" of primitive innocency. But as a pre-
Marxist (a development which even non-Marxists hail as
progress in reason) he attributes sin to property, and hopes
that the abolition of an institution will change the char-
acter of men. The whole modern radical error of attributing
injustice to the social institutions, which were the main
instruments of inequality and domination, is contained as a
seed in Winstanley's thought.

The French Revolution was notoriously ambiguous toward
the problem of property. The Jacobins attempted to cover
this confusion by the expedient of dispossessing the enemies
of the Revolution and conferring the property upon the
"patriots." Equalitarianism was associated with communism
in the thought of the most rigorous equalitarians. Malby, for
instance, believed that equality was one of "nature's" laws.
"You will easily see," he declared, "how important it is to
study the natural law . . . the law of equality among men.
. . . Without such study morality without certain principles
would run the risk of erring at every step." The discovery
of the transcendent principle of justice and equality in
"nature" was of course characteristic of all of the thought
of the Enlightenment, and we find an echo of it in our
Declaration of Independence.

The rigorously collectivist and equalitarian tendencies of
the Revolution, having been lost in the ambiguities of the
early Revolution, tried to gain a triumph and were defeated
in the Paris Commune. This attempt and defeat inspired
Marx's resolutions and expectations. Why was the Revo-

* True Levellers Standard Advanced, 1649.

THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

lution in France so ambiguous? In answering this question,
we shall come upon many of the secrets of the wisdom of
history, correcting the explicit wisdom and the attendant
foolishness of men. For through the lack of the expected
correlation between liberty and equality it was possible for
modern society to elaborate a communal justice with a tol-
erable equality and liberty which was better than the justice
of traditional society, and which negated the abstract notions
of the idealists who upset the old order for good cause; but
with mistaken notions about the perennial factors in the
anatomy of the community.

The vague identification of liberty and equality in both
seventeenth-century sectarianism and the French Enlighten-
ment undoubtedly derived from the eschatalogical views of
the sectaries and the Enlightenment's views of "nature." Both
the kingdom of God and "nature" were supposed to present
the norms of equality and liberty. The similarity of the
norms is eloquent testimony of the Christian inheritance in
the conceptions of those who ostensibly defied and despised
this inheritance. The two norms were vaguely identified be-
cause it was believed that an elimination of traditional politi-
cal coercions automatically would make for equality. That was
the physiocratic theory which Adam Smith was to elaborate
and upon which our "free enterprise" is founded. Property
was vaguely identified with inequality, but not consistently so.
This lack of consistency was undoubtedly due to the com-
position of the revolutionary forces of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. They consisted of peasants and com-
mercial classes in the first instance, and of commercial classes
and industrial workers in its later stages. Of these three,
the middle classes were the only ones who possessed property.
Moreover, they possessed a very dynamic form of property,
which was soon to prove a more potent social power than
landed property. That left only the agrarian and the indus-
trial poor who had ideological reasons for believing property
to be the chief cause of injustice; and among the agrarian
poor there were a small number of free-holders who had a
more personal attachment to their property in the soil than

PROPERTY, SOCIAL HIERARCHY AND JUSTICE 195

any of the bourgeoisie. This is why the Marxist dogma was
too slow in taking root, and why it could take root only in
decadent feudal societies of Asia where the monstrous injus-
tices, too tardily corrected, could create the revolutionary
resentments which would persuade a community to adopt
even implausible creeds in its desperation. The middle classes
which were originally ambiguously involved in the attack
upon the traditional order came, in time, to be the most
assiduous defenders of the rights of property, and the class
which was most blind to the abuses of economic power.

These same middle classes were convinced that equality and
liberty were not only compatible, but that equality flowed
from liberty, that is, from the liberty to exercise one's own
initiative without traditional restraints.

One of the most ironic facts in modern history is that the
middle classes which elaborated modern culture first sup-
ported liberty under the illusion that it would make for
equality, and subsequently supported the idea because they
were convinced that it would not. For they had meanwhile
secured their equality with the aristocracy; and they were
not anxious to share it with the industrial workers, who inci-
dentally had no such potent force as dynamic property to
enforce their demands for equality. Thus the middle classes
were as assiduous in protecting their liberty against the
political power dominated by the poor as they were rigorous
in establishing it against the political power dominated by the
aristocrats. In the one case, it was done to achieve equal jus-
tice and in the other case to prevent more equal justice
(particularly by that body of rigorous libertarians who op-
posed the "welfare state") .

This is how the civil war began between the two classes,
the bourgeoisie and industrial workers, who were once com-
rades-in-arms in a common struggle against an aristocratic
feudal society. This is how the tension between liberty and
equality as norms of justice became apparent.

The original chapter in this war, which almost wrecked
the whole of Western society, seemed wholly to justify the
Marxist creed by which the industrial workers ultimately

196 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

became armed. Industrialism In its earlier stages certainly
seemed to justify the Marxist polemic against "capitalism."
Economic freedom did not make for equality and justice.
The theorists had neglected to observe that the market place,
that alleged equalizer of everything, would not be capable of
an equal bargain for two bargainers of unequal power, the
employer and worker, for instance. The boasted "enlightened
self-interest" of the utilitarians proved to be an equally frail
reed for justice to rely upon. For self-interest proved itself
too powerful to bow to the persuasion of enlightenment. The
inequalities of an agrarian society became dynamic. Social real-
ities seemed to justify even Marxist catastrophism according
to which the bourgeois civilization, boasting of "liberty and
equality," would hasten the "class struggle" to a climax of
injustice and would brush out all the poetic veils for injus-
tice which a feudal society cultivated, thus leaving the "cash
Nexus" open and exposed, and curing the victims of social
injustice of their long illusions.

What happened to change this grim picture and expecta-
tion? Why has the Marxist creed, designed for the ripe and
over-ripe period of "capitalism/' failed to take root there
and has been relevant instead to the decadent feudal societies,
particularly in Asia?

What happened was an analogy of the organic adaptations
of traditional societies within the new conditions of a tech-
nical society. Social forces not too conscious of themselves,
or at least not armed with explicit philosophies, took imme-
diate actions to fend off particular forms of injustice. The
workers were individually weak in bargaining with the em-
ployer. They could redress some of the balance by collective
action. Thus the trade unions were born and nourished by
the workers, while the intellectuals elaborated schemes of
redemption which were to prove ultimately to be the root
of modern tyranny. The workers never acquired the social
power of the middle classes, even when skilled and even when
acting collectively. A theory was never developed which would
determine just how much privilege would be justified by
special social function or power or for the purpose of pro-

PROPERTY,, SOCIAL HIERARCHY AND JUSTICE 197

viding incentives for the performance of function. But the
steps which were taken to prevent inordinate inequalities
of privilege from arising chiefly by preventing inordinate
disbalances of power from developing proved adequate to
save modern society from revolution and disintegration. It
saved at least the healthiest members of modern civilization.
Among those less healthy it is significant that a typically
bourgeois nation (France) and one with remnants of tradi-
tional feudal injustice (Italy) are most exposed to the perils
of revolution because in them either agrarian or industrial
poor have become desperate. The flexible instruments of jus-
tice, designed for equilibrating power, do not seem to work
in their case. It became apparent, incidentally, that an exact
definition of how much injustice may be allowed for the inte-
gration of society is not as important as an "open" situation
in which the hope for improvement of one's lot is never
snuffed out.

Ultimately, of course, the workers became aware that equali-
zation of economic power was not enough to establish justice.
The class that manipulated political power and set the rules
for the game had an undue advantage. The workers there-
fore organized political as well as economic power. Despite
the fact that the commercial classes were established in the
seats of political power, the political liberty which they
had established was serviceable to other classes.

In Europe the industrial workers have their own parties,
informed by a quasi-Marxist creed. But in our own nation the
absence of any rigorous Marxist movement has not prevented a
comparable party alignment between those classes who are
interested in qualifying economic by political power in the
interest of justice and security and those who resist the
encroachment of political authority upon the economic sphere
because they possess either enough property or personal skill
to enjoy security and dislike any control upon their initiative.

In any case, both political power and economic power have
been sufficiently balanced to prevent grave injustice. The
process has been accomplished by exploiting the political
freedom beyond the ideological intent in the motives of the

198 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

first proponents of liberty. This effect in the field of social
and economic life is analogous to the establishment of liberty
in the cultural and religious sphere. It is enjoyed by all,
though the original proponents of religious liberty were less
interested in liberty as such than in their own emancipation
from oppressive majorities. In either case, a free society de-
rives general profit from the interested desires of particular
groups, each group leaving a deposit of virtue in the com-
munity beyond its intentions and interests. The health and
justice of the community is preserved, not so much by the
discriminate judgement of the whole community as by the
effect of free criticism in moderating the pretensions of every
group and by the weight of competing power in balancing
power which might become inordinate and oppressive. De-
mocracy in short is not a method which is effective only among
virtuous men. It is a method which prevents interested men
from following their interests to the detriment of the com-
munity. There must of course be a minimal inclination for
justice to furnish a base of community. For if groups and
individuals merely pursue their interests without a measure
of self-restraint, no political restraint, short of a tyrannical
and oppressive one, could preserve the unity of the com-
munity. Hobbes' proposals for order through despotism are
mistaken in assuming a consistency of self-interest which is
not apparent in human history. Men do not follow their own
interests consistently in defiance of the community. They do
however interpret the interests of the community with a
reason tainted by considerations of their own interests.

All modern nations are engaged in political debate on the
question how much or how little economic life shall be regu-
lated. There is no "ideal" solution for this issue. It will
probably remain inconclusive for a long while, both because
the contestants are fairly equal in strength and because the
consequences from their proposals are ambiguous. Complete
economic liberty obviously makes for injustice because forces
in the economic process itself lead to centralization of power.
Healthy free societies have therefore used the broadly based

PROPERTY, SOCIAL HIERARCHY AND JUSTICE 199

political power (universal suffrage) to equalize the inequali-
ties of economic power, to establish minimal standards of
security and justice, and to assure the community some serv-
ices which the market does not find it profitable to supply.
These are the general and minimal accomplishments of the
"welfare state" which develop in healthy nations, whether
their original orientation was "capitalistic" or "socialistic."
The development confounds the Marxist theory which regards
government as merely the "executive committee" of the
property holders.

Thus the development of the trade unions and the growth
of the welfare state have negated the historical "logic" which,
according to the Marxists, made a climax of injustice and
revolution inevitable in a technical civilization.

These effects are so desirable that one might well ask why
it would not be right to increase the consistency of the logic
which produced these effects. But such a view does not con-
sider the genuine virtue in the philosophy of a free economy.
The proponents of "free enterprise" guaranteed that equality
would flow inevitably from the release of all economic vital-
ities. They were wrong. But they were not wrong in Adam
Smith's contention that we must secure the assistance of our
fellow men by "engaging their self-interest rather than their
benevolence." A free economy may have been in danger of
substituting the "law of supply and demand" for the moral
law. But it has meanwhile released energies for production
which no moral or political control of economic activity ever
released. It has, in short, harnessed rather than suppressed
self-interest. It has created a vast system of mutual services
through a competition of interests. The claim that it has done
this perfectly is ideologically tainted and must be resisted.
But it can not be denied that the market place furnishes for
the complexities of modern trade and for the mutual services
of highly specialized skills, a counterpart of the unconscious
adjustments to community which made traditional society
organic.

Therefore every effort to restrict freedom in the interest

200 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

of justice has its limits, even as the effort to secure justice
from the effects of freedom is limited.

There is a certain danger in modern democracies that the
balance of political forces and the limits of the proposals for
justice of each party may create a "dead center/' making
further progress impossible. But ideally we have merely
approached a situation in Western political history in which
we have discovered, by tortuous experience, that liberty and
equality are strictly compatible only in the heart of perfect
love. They are partly contradictory in the political order.
For politics is an effort to establish tolerable community,
the sinfulness of men presupposed. The tension between
competing interests makes authority, contradicting equality,
necessary. The interests of the "rulers" make this authority
dangerous to justice. The sentimentalities of the Enlighten-
ment about liberty and equality were the consequence of its
errors about human nature.

We have, even now, failed to solve theoretically the prob-
lem how much privilege special function requires; and how
much power is necessary to maintain order. We have however
reached moderately satisfactory practical solutions of these
problems, not by disinterested intelligence but by the balance
of interested wisdom. We know that the integration of com-
munity requires not only the authority of government but
various subordinate authorities in economic life. We know
that authority means power; and that power usually arrogates
more privilege to itself than a pure wisdom or conscience
could justify. We have learned how to moderate these excesses
by balancing power as much as possible. But we realize that
the balancing of power can not reach a consistency which
would destroy the integration of the community. For the com-
munity is integrated by centers of authority which defy the
abstract principle of equality.

These discoveries of common experience have refuted the
presuppositions of the Enlightenment to which we in Amer-
ica are still consciously committed. They have justified Luther's
definition of the political or civic realm as an "empire of

PROPERTY, SOCIAL HIERARCHY AND JUSTICE 201

sin to restrain sin." It was a real insight which Luther tended
to discredit by his lack of discrimination. It is an insight
without which modern idealists will forever try to rid com-
munities of the instruments of community, government, hier-
archy of authority and property because these produce by-
products of injustice, but fail to recognize that they are also
instruments of justice and order. The recognition of the moral
ambiguities of these instruments is tantamount to the dis-
covery why the "kingdom of God" is relevant to every his-
toric situation but can never be realized in history, and why
the love which creates community must be tentatively vio-
lated to give the community the bones of authority for the
flesh of its brotherhood.

Perhaps it is necessary to add that we in America have
achieved a tolerable solution for these problems in actual
experience without penetrating to the heart of the mystery
of community because of some very favorable circumstances.
The wide and open continent, the wealth and productiveness
of our industry and the shattering of the class distinctions and
resentments of the European society mitigated the class strug-
gle and made for equality at the most strategic place: equality
of opportunity, and provided for a sufficiently generous social
fund to permit a faulty distribution of the fund without
resentment. For when everyone is gaining in wealth or wel-
fare, the questions of justice are not asked too anxiously, and
injustices in distribution of privileges are not the cause of
vehement resentments.

As a nation, we therefore belong to the healthier nations
of the Western world who have reached a tolerable solution
of the problem of justice within the conditions set by a
dynamic civilization. But the favorable circumstances which
aided us in finding practical solutions prevented us from
discovering the principles which underlie such a solution.

This fact is rather unfortunate in view of the power which
we have in the process of integrating an embryo world com-
munity. To this problem we must now devote our attention.

Chapter 22

THE INTEGRATION OF THE WORLD
COMMUNITY

JLhe United Nations is not exactly the "Parlia-
ment of Mankind and Federation of the World" which the
nineteenth century fondly believed to be the "one far-off
divine event, to which the whole creation moves." It is never-
theless a symbol of what was true in the illusions of the
previous century. It shows how man's communal problem
develops toward global proportions. The ambiguities of the
United Nations however refute the error in these hopes.
The hopes erroneously implied that historical development
would, In a sense, guarantee the solution of problems, the
dimensions of which were constantly extended.

The most vivid proof that this was an error Is given by
two contemporary facts which were not at all anticipated.
The one is the attempt of communism to organize the whole
world upon the basis of its Utopian vision. The other is the
development of atomic weapons which, in a breathlessly brief
time, has confronted us with the dread possibilities of destruc-
tion through the hydrogen bomb. The one development has
divided the world into two camps. The other has filled the
enmity between the two with the awful possibility of mutual

202

THE INTEGRATION OF THE WORLD COMMUNITY 203

annihilation. Both developments are reminders that every
historical advance is fraught with possibilities of good and
evil. Human history would seem to remain ambiguous, if not
to its end, then at least to the present moment.

Thus we face the problem of integrating the world com-
munity under unanticipated hazards. For the fulfillment
of our task it is obvious that we require all the instruments
of rational discrimination which our various social and his-
torical sciences are able to develop.

The social conditions of community have shifted so rap-
idly and the factors to be taken into consideration are so
endlessly varied that it would seem that the primary neces-
sity is a development of all the social and political sciences
with a particular view of overcoming the "cultural lag." This
favorite diagnosis for all our ills seems to have acquired new
relevance today. Must we not help people to meet the new
situations which they confront by measures appropriate to
the situation? Must we not establish educational programs
to impress upon the new generation the responsibilities and
perils of "one world"? Must we not help Americans, living
in a paradise of luxury in comparison with world standards,
to recognize the problems of peoples emerging from a prim-
itive economy and possibly from colonial tutelage? Must we
not, as our sensitive spirits insist, make technical instruments
and skills available to them to overcome their poverty? Having
done that, must we not be wise enough to send cultural an-
thropologists along with our technicians in recognition of
the fact that "raising living standards" is not a simple pro-
cedure? It involves breaking the mold of organic societies and
exposing communities to the peril of social disintegration.

In all these problems a greater knowledge of all the
factors involved and a larger perspective upon the total situa-
tion is certainly a primary necessity for the kind of states-
manship which will guide the nations toward a political and
moral integration.

But perhaps this is another instance in which the presup-
positions, from the standpoint of which we gather the facts,

204 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

are as important as the diligence and honesty with which
we try to ascertain the facts.

The most diligent elaboration of social and political skills
seems not to have challenged the basic presuppositions of our
culture in regard to the problem which we confront. That
presupposition is that the forces of history are tractable if
we only amass sufficient insight and skill to manage them;
that even the most complex problems may be solved if we
approach them with sufficient knowledge and resolution. In
short, we approach them as potential managers of our own
and other people's destiny. It has seemingly not dawned upon
us that we have only limited competence in deflecting his-
torical destinies in the drama of history in which we are
creatures as well as creators and in which we meet competi-
tive creators who have contrasting ideas of our common
destiny.

The immediate consequence of these exaggerated notions of
man's competence as an historical creator is that our idealists
project all kinds of programs for integrating the world com-
munity purely by artifact and conscious contrivance. Our
realists follow contrasting, but essentially similar pretentious,
schemes of community. The one dream of world government;
the other would establish the supremacy of our nation in the
world community purely by the affirmation of our technical
power.

Both the idealists and the realists propose to solve the
problems of the world community by a display of wisdom or
of power, by an extension of the artifacts of community and
by disregard of the organic factors. Both tend to disregard
the possibility of unpredictable emergences in the drama of
history. This disregard of the organic growths of the past
and of the unpredictable emergences of the future, this em-
phasis on artifact and contrivance would seem to be plausible
enough at first blush. Every extension of community does
indeed imply a greater reliance on artifact and less reliance
on organic factors.

The nascent world community certainly possesses few or-

THE INTEGRATION OF THE WORLD COMMUNITY 205

ganic factors of cohesion. It lacks a common language and a
common culture. The common element in its diverse moral
systems is probably the single idea that order is to be pre-
ferred to chaos. Its means of communication are growing, but
they have not grown enough to establish the sense of an
integral community. Economic interdependence is as fre-
quently the cause of friction as of accord. The world com-
munity is bereft of not only those organic factors which
are closest to "nature/' but also organic historical factors
such as memories of a comradeship in meeting a common
danger.

It is however significant that this factor is being supplied
in each half of a divided world by the enmity between the
two halves. There is of course no prospect of peace in these
new historical factors on both sides. For the integration of
each power bloc increases the tension between the two. But
before dismissing this possibility of integration, we must ex-
amine the historical forces at work more carefully. They may
offer more hope than the explicit contrivances of world com-
munity. There are indications that these historical factors
are certainly more potent in forming community in the so-
called "free" world than all the constitutional arrangements,
except as the latter serve the community whose unity has
been forged by the fires of present emergencies. The organi-
zation of the free world is an historic product with absolutely
unforeseen perils and promises. It exists through the organi-
zation of various ad hoc defensive arrangements under the
aegis of the United Nations. The United Nations itself can
not of course be a final security against the war between the
two blocs. It was organized on the basis of the idea of unanim-
ity between the great powers. This idea is expressed in the
right of the veto of the great powers. This idea betrays, on
the one hand, the illusions of the past decade that the free
world could establish community with communism. The in-
transigeance of this political movement was not correctly esti-
mated. But the veto right has another justification beside
the one furnished by this illusion. It is based upon a shrewd

206 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

Insight which the idealists who would abolish the veto do not
understand. This insight is that the world community Is not
sufficiently integrated to permit a majority to be victorious
over a minority in the councils of the nations. For in that
case the minority, having the power and the inclination,
would merely challenge the majority by the arbitrament of
war. The grant of the right of veto is based upon the under-
standing that the world community has not yet reached a
degree of integration in which minorities trust majorities.
Yet this trust is a basic requirement of the constitutional
instruments of which we are so fond.

Thus the United Nations, incapable of serving its original
purposes, serves the very necessary end of integrating the world
as far as present realities permit. On the one hand, it is a
minimal bridge across the chasm between Russia and the
West. On the other hand, it furnishes the meeting ground
for the free nations, the aegis for its various ad hoc arrange-
ments for defensive communities; and an assembly of peoples
In which world opinion serves to check the policies of the
most powerful nations in the alliance. These are quite im-
portant and yet unintended services to the process of integra-
tion. It is one of the interesting revelations of the charm of
historical surprises that all these factors of cohesion would
probably not have had a chance to become established if the
framers of the original United Nations charter had not been
beguiled from their justified fears by an unjustified hope.

The loyalties and mutual trusts which are forming in these
ad hoc arrangements such as "NATO" are certainly more
potent than any possible explicit contractual commitments,
though as the loyalties grow, they will presumably avail
themselves of more adequate institutional arrangements.

In addition to these nascent forms of "social tissue" in
the form of mutual trusts and loyalties, the free world is being
integrated by another "organic" factor, which is less obvi-
ously moral but no less necessary. That is the Integration
through differentiation of authority, chiefly by power. A
hierarchy of power and authority has been furnished for the

THE INTEGRATION OF THE WORLD COMMUNITY 207

world community by historical "accidents," chiefly the wholly
unanticipated rise of American power and the sudden trans-
formation of an isolationist nation, content with continental
security, to the hegemonous power among the free nations.
It goes without saying that the American leadership has not
been established by explicit consent, though it must deserve
the implicit consent of the community to survive. It is also
obvious that the preponderance of American power is as
valuable for the unity of the free world as it is dangerous
to justice. In this, the situation does not differ very much
from the creative and perilous factors in all such hegemonous
situations in past imperial integrations. Perhaps the Greek
city-states could not achieve unity because Athens and Sparta
were too equally balanced in power. About the lack of ap-
prenticeship of our nation for these great responsibilities and
about other peculiar rather than perennial hazards in this
American possession of preponderant power, we must speak
presently. At present, it is necessary merely to call attention
to the fact that the integration of at least half of the world
community has proceeded through forces and factors which
were less under the conscious control of men than our philos-
ophies would find tolerable. Yet they have been provisionally
more successful that the more obvious artifacts.

All this integration leaves us, of course, with the two
embattled power blocs and the peril of atomic destruction
through a possible conflict between them. If we are to escape
disaster, both sides would have to be sufficiently aware of
this peril to be more than ordinarily hesitant to take any
step which would lead to general conflict. If we are to escape
unification of the world through tyrannical power, the loose
organization of the free world would have to outlast the
monolithic unity of the tyrannical world, and it would also
have to be more successful than communism in bidding for
the loyalties of the non-committed nations. In that case the
present growths might yet contribute to the ultimate inte-
gration of the world community. Such an eventuality would
of course be possible only if the tyrannical power, having

208 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

served the purpose of providing the danger which prompted
the free nations to integrate their efforts and communities,
would gradually lose its power to challenge the world. It is
not probable that it will cease to exist as a potent secular
religion. But it could well continue to exist without the power
to challenge the world.

Such a loss of historical dynamic is not unprecedented.
Mohammedanism was once a dynamic politico-religious move-
ment. It has not ceased to exist, but it now lacks the power
to challenge any established unity. The hoped for loss of his-
torical dynamism of the now so powerful a movement could
come about through the disillusionment of the world in the
truth of the communist dogma. There are so many facts of
experience which refute the dogma that there is some hope
that the dogma will not always hold its sway over the con-
science and consciousness of men. The other cause for hope
is that there are no instruments or inclinations in its dogmas
and strategies for the accommodation of divergent interests,
without which it is not possible to integrate a great alliance
of power. According to its simple creed, every divergence of
interest or conviction seems to be a threat of treason to the
basic loyalty. In the long run, the Russian dominated alliance
is therefore likely to disintegrate.

Naturally many hazards must be overcome for the culmina-
tion of this solution of our world problems. Of these, two
deserve special mention. The one hazard is the attractive
power of the communist creed in the non-technical civiliza-
tions, chiefly in Asia. The other is the dubious endowment
of our own nation for the leadership which historical events
have thrust upon us in this world crisis. Both hazards deserve
mention because they are both related to the theme of the
relation of organic factors in community building to the con-
trivances of statecraft.

Communism is found attractive by the Asian nations for
exactly the same reasons that the revolutionary creeds suc-
ceeded in France of the eighteenth century and Russia in
the twentieth century. The social facts and resentments of a

THE INTEGRATION OF THE WORLD COMMUNITY 209

dying feudal structure, based in an agrarian economy, cor-
respond more nearly to the Marxist diagnosis than any of the
facts of the technical world, particularly after that world has
corrected the original injustices of its economic and political
life. The injustices of such a world are the obvious conse-
quences of the disbalances of power in the traditional struc-
ture. They are naturally attributed to the character of that
structure. It does not occur to anyone that he may be dealing
with perennial factors which might be aggravated under the
disbalances of a contrived revolutionary social system. The
illusions from which Asia suffers are therefore almost iden-
tical to those, from which it required Western civilization
generations to be emancipated.

Furthermore, the modern Asian nations have an additional
reason for their illusions. The first impact of the European
technically equipped nations upon them was "imperialistic."
They were reduced in that encounter to colonial status, to
political and economic dependence. They cherish profound
resentments against this dependence which are effective now
even if the injustices remain only as memories, the independ-
ence of many having been won. It is therefore easy for the
communist overlords to present European civilization as
"imperialistic" and to derive the imperialism from the "cap-
italism" for the imagination of the Asian world. It is even
possible to hide the new imperialistic impulses of Russian
hegemony. For according to the communist creed, Russia is
but the holy land of an emancipating political faith. All these
illusions are possible; and the resulting embarrassment to us
is aggravated by the fact that the Western system of justice
preserves liberties which are not as dear as we imagine to
peoples who were buried until recently in the organic cohe-
sions of a feudal society. Furthermore, the delicate balance
of power by which justice is preserved and extended in mod-
ern technical societies is the product of a long history of
trial and error. It is therefore probably beyond the compe-
tence, as it is certainly beyond the comprehension, of these
awakened peoples. In short, our "way of life" does not have

210 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

the persuasive power which we attribute to it. It is perfectly
possible for the nations of Asia to slip from the tyranny of
the older social forms to the new tyranny under the illusion
that the new system is better, and not worse. We must there-
fore expect many a defeat in Asia before the tragic facts,
gradually disclosed to the Western world in the past decades
of experience, are revealed to the Asian nations. Every defeat
increases the danger of a desperate defensive gesture by the
defeated party, a gesture which might start the atomic conflict
which it is so necessary to avoid. It can easily be understood
why European nations have come to the conclusion that the
danger of stumbling into the war is greater on our side than
on the side of communism. We must admit that communism
is not primarily a military movement. It avails itself of revo-
lutionary pressures and conspiratorial technic in the first
instance though it is not adverse to the use of military weapons
when it can do so without risk of a general war. It certainly
will not wittingly begin such a war so long as its other methods
and weapons continue in their present success.

An American must speak with regret of the other great
hazard to the success of an undertaking requiring great cool-
ness as the whole world negotiates its differences on the edge
of the abyss of atomic destruction. For that hazard is the
lack in our own nation of those qualities and competencies,
required for the word leadership which historical destiny
has thrust upon us. Certainly the rise of America to world
leadership is as surprising an eventuality as the atomic age
itself. American world leadership was not quite unanticipated.
Alexis de Tocqueville writing in 1835 had this remarkable
prescient prophecy about both America and Russia:

"There are at the present time two great nations in the world,
which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the
same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of
them have grown up unnoticed; and while the attention of man-
kind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves
in the front rank among the nations, and the world learned their
existence and their greatness at almost the same time.

THE INTEGRATION OF THE WORLD COMMUNITY 211

"All other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural
limits, and they have only to maintain their power; but these are
still in the act of growth. All others have stopped, or continue to
advance with extreme difficulty; these alone are proceeding with
ease and celerity along a path to which no limit can be perceived.
The American struggles against the obstacles that nature opposes
to him; the adversaries of the Russian are men. The former com-
bats the wilderness and savage life, the latter civilization with all
its arms. The conquests of the American are therefore gained by
the plowshare; those of the Russian by the sword. The Anglo-
American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends and
gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of
the people; the Russian centers all the authority of society in a
single arm. The principal instrument of the former is freedom;
of the latter, servitude. Their starting point is different and their
courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by
the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe/' 1

Our most obvious deficiencies do not arise from our lack
of apprenticeship for so great a task, though it would have
been fortunate if responsibilities of such enormity had not
been thrust upon us so soon after we were thrown out of
the cradle of our continental security and bidden to nego-
tiate the tricky currents of world politics. Our deficiencies
are also not due, in the first instance, to our pride of power.
All powerful individuals and nations have exhibited a like
corruption. Our friends have given us credit for the virtue
of having achieved so great an eminence without having
lusted for it. We are in the unusual position, in fact, of
having been very reluctant to acknowledge both the power
and the responsibilities which we now bear. This virtue is of
course not a clear gain. For the absence of lust for power
grants no immunity against pride in its possession. We may,
in fact, aggravate that pride by the pretension that we do
not have it. But sensible men are usually patient with these
corruptions, as they were patient with the arrogance of kings

i Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America, Vol. I, p. 434.

212 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

of old. The international community of course lacks the
traditions by which the arrogance of kings was veiled and
transfigured in the imagination of their subjects. These tra-
ditions probably would not avail in any event to hide the
vices of collective kings.

Yet these unique deficiencies of inexperience and perennial
vices of the corruption of power are not our chief problem
or the world's chief problem with us. The chief problem arises
from our inclination to accentuate all the errors and illusions
of Western civilization in regard to man's mastery of historical
destiny. We are tempted by various factors in our history to
the error of imagining historical destiny to be under the
dominion of man. Only yesterday we seemed in complete
control of our own destiny within the limits of our con-
tinental security. We are not yet accustomed to the fact that
we are more powerless in our larger world scene in the day
of our seeming omnipotence than we were in the days of
our innocent impotence. The power which gives us such em-
inence on the world scene is drawn from our technical
competence and our economic abundance. Its possession there-
fore leaves us unconscious of the loyalties and trusts, the
allegiances and habits of adherence which are compounded
in the larger communal integrations. We are, essentially,
children of the Enlightenment. The ideas of the Enlightenment
seemed to achieve special revelance in our history because
our nation came into being by the covenant of our Con-
stitution. This fact obscured the organic factors which en-
tered into the forming of our nation: the comradeship in
arms against a common foe, the common language and culture,
the propinquity of a virgin continent. It is therefore not
surprising that we should believe communities to be the fruit
of simple contrivances of the human will. These convictions
make us impatient with historical frustrations and unpre-
pared for the experience of defeat. It is not surprising that
our European allies suspect us of heedlessness and despera-
tion in moments of frustration, and are afraid that our
desperation because of disappointments, particularly in Asia,

THE INTEGRATION OF THE WORLD COMMUNITY 213

may tempt us into taking the fateful steps which lead to a
global war. These fears are incidentally responsible for the
threats to our alliance with our European allies. The show
of our power can not remedy the weakness in our alliance,
for power, though necessary, can not supplant the mutual
trust which must be the primary cement of political cohesion.
Our impatience thus tends to destroy organic growths of
community which are very precious because they are beyond
conscious contrivance. Our moral weaknesses are aggravated
by the fact that our idealists are not as active in resisting our
impatience and pride as in projecting more ideal constitu-
tional arrangements for world community which must remain
irrelevant to our present emergencies. For these constitutional
instruments can only perfect that which the slow processes of
common experience have formed.

The immediate issue between ourselves and our allies is
the question of "co-existence" with communism. Despite the
fact that we dread the alternative of war as much as they,
we do not seem really to believe in the possibility of co-
existence. Our lack of confidence is prompted partly by our
belief that communism will always have the same power and
venom as it now displays. We might well grant that the venom
compounded of power lusts and human self-deceptions will
remain consistent. But the power may not be consistently
menacing for reasons previously considered. In any event, our
attitude reveals a pretension of omniscience toward the future.
This is almost as grievous a mistake as the pretension of
omnipotence.

A wise statesmanship naturally rests upon a modest dis-
inclination to penetrate, or to seem to penetrate, the veil of the
future any further than immediate foresight makes necessary.
It is better in fact for the statesman to be completely sceptical
about the meaning of history and to regard its drama as a
"series of emergencies" than to have too confident a philosophy
of history. The statesmanlike slogan should be "sufficient unto
the day are the evils thereof." That slogan is particularly
appropriate in a day in which the evil of tomorrow might be

214 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

atomic destruction. It goes without saying that the resistance
to the spread of tyranny by all appropriate measures is a
necessary part of such statesmanship. Naturally, the world will,
despite the perils of war, finally choose this dread alternative
if it were the only means of escape from slavery. At least,
that part of the world which has known and cherishes free-
dom would make such a choice. And it is idle for idealists
to persuade that part of the freedom loving world that slavery
might be preferable to death and that there are prospects of
the gradual relaxation of its terror.

Winston Churchill of all contemporary statesmen is the
most perfect embodiment of such wisdom. His attitudes reveal
that his modesty in regard to man's capacity to foresee the
future is not incompatible with rigorous action in averting
present dangers. The same man who seeks to persuade to give
"co-existence a good try" is the man who warned our heedless
statesmen a decade ago not to trust communist intention too
naively. 2

Mr. Churchill's embodiment of this wisdom is significant
for many reasons. We have assumed such wisdom to be the
final fruit of a Biblical faith. But Mr. Churchill is not an
explicitly pious man though a wartime colleague of his has
testified that Chui chill's religion consists primarily of "a
strong sense of providence." Thus it is uncertain from what
source Mr. Churchill has drawn his wisdom, though it must
be confessed that, though highly individual, it also expresses
the typical reactions of a whole European culture.

The "common sense" of the European nations, especially
as contrasted with our own seeming heedlessness, may well
be the fruit of long experience rather than specifically Chris-
tian insights. We have previously observed the coincidence
between the wisdom of common sense and the characteristic
insights of Biblical faith. That coincidence is due to their
common acceptance of the fragmentary and inconclusive

2 There are welcome signs that our American President, Mr. Eisen-
hower, shares Churchill's attitude toward world problems to a greater
extent than the nation as a whole and more than seemed at first apparent.

THE INTEGRATION OF THE WORLD COMMUNITY 215

nature o the various themes and dramas which fill the human
story. We have all learned to accept this fragmentariness for
our individual life, whether it leads to despair or the tre-
mendous adventure of faith, that our fragmentary lives and
projects are ultimately purged and completed in a divine
design beyond our comprehension. But what has been ac-
cepted by individual selves does not readily lend itself to
transference to the collective national self, which is bound
to find the idea irksome, A-hat it is powerless either to discern,
or to fulfill what it discerns, as the true end of history. In
the case of our nation, this temptation is particularly great
because our power is very great, our experience with the
frustration of history is limited, and our culture is informed
by strains of perfectionist and Utopian illusions stemming from
the Enlightenment on the one hand and from sectarian
Christianity on the other.

Thus we are in danger of bringing human history to a
premature conclusion (its "end" as "finis") because we
imagine that we have discerned the true end of history ("end"
as final purpose) . A touch of irony is added to this situa-
tion because we imagine the defeat of communism to be his-
tory's true end, and we have forgotten that some of the evils
of communism are derived from the fact that it regarded
"capitalism" as the final form of evil and therefore proposed
to grasp the summum bonum of history by the destruction of
capitalism. It is certainly significant that so much evil is born
of these frantic graspings after the final end of history.

The idea of a brotherly world community is certainly more
legitimate as the goal of history than either of these concep-
tions of fulfillment through victory over a hated foe. But
it is certainly significant that two less attractive alternatives
are more probable than this ideal. The one is global destruc-
tion through atomic conflict. This alternative is not really as
probable as those would persuade us who believe the dread
possibility might scare the nascent world community into
virtue, if not into existence. But it remains a possibility. The
other alternative is a period of development in which destruc-

216 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

tive conflict will be avoided, but in which no neat world
order will be achieved. This alternative is, of all possibilities,
most probable. It would not change the international situation
from the status of partial order and partial anarchy of the
past centuries very radically. It would merely heighten the
perils of anarchy and increase the potency of community.
If we are patient enough we could cultivate the gradually
growing organic factors of world community and perfect them
at opportune moments by the constitutional contrivances
which always express and perfect what the forces of life and
togetherness have established.

Our nation will be able to contribute to these develop-
ments, as it is purged of its illusions by the experiences of
history. It will be purged as surely as old men have accepted
the limits of human striving more definitely than young
men. It is natural that young men and young nations should
be concerned primarily to extend the limits of human power
and explore the resources in every human potentiality. It is
as natural for old men and nations to be persuaded by frus-
trations and common experiences that there are limits for
both individuals and nations, as indeed for all human striving.
When the fragmentariness of all human existence, both in-
dividual and collective, is fully realized, and human creativ-
ity is content to operate within this fragmentariness, it
achieves a new possibility of creating without the threat of
disaster. We can only hope that we will be mercifully saved
from the fate of bringing our own and a very great common
enterprise to a premature and violent conclusion so that we
may have the chance of being purged of our illusions and,
in a more modest mood, dedicate our great energies and
virtues to the building of a tolerable world community.

Chapter 23

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE DES-
TINIES IN THE CONTEMPORARY
SITUATION

"E.

..tie engagement of sensitive individuals, or for
that matter of any individuals, in the perplexities and perils
of nations, cultures, and even of the whole enterprise of
civilization, which we discussed in the previous chapter, does
not annul any private hopes or ambitions or simplify the
drama of any individual life. Our contemporary situation is
therefore a vivid reminder of the fact that while history
constantly enlarges the scope of the collective drama which
becomes the basis of all individual destinies, it does not
obviate any of the problems which the single self faces in its
involvement in, and transcendence over, its collective destinies.
The individual may become involved in responsibilities for
the security of a world-wide community; and the perennial
fear of death may appear in the new dimension of the fear
of mutual annihilation through atomic destruction. But these
wider responsibilities and more terrible dangers do not change
the situation of the self essentially. It still has hopes and fears,
fulfillments and frustrations, which are partly related to, and
are partly independent of, the collective drama. It still faces
the grandeur and the misery of its existence. Its grandeur or

217

218 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

dignity is still derived from its ability to transcend the tem-
poral flux and to touch the fringes of the eternal. Its misery
is still compounded of both "death and sin/' that is, of both
the essential brevity of a life concerned with such ultimate
matters; and of the evil into which it falls by attempting to
avoid or obscure the brevity and insignificance of its life.
In the words of Augustine, it "falls into sin, which it could
avoid, by attempting to escape death which it can not avoid."
Even if the collective fulfillments of the meaning of life,
promised to this generation, had not proved to be illusory,
any individual, living at any particular locus of the sweep
of history, would have been justified in the poignant cry of
the Fourth Ezra: "What doth it profit us that ages of fulfill-
ment are promised them (our posterity) whereas we perish
so miserably in futility?"

Even the most perfect community can not overcome the
fragmentary nature of the self s life or still its uneasy con-
science, either because it did not conform to the community's
standards or because it failed to rise above them sufficiently.
It is bound to suffer from the latter form of uneasiness be-
cause it always has some source of norms and standards higher
than those of the community. Furthermore, even the most
impressive collective enterprise can not obscure the weakness
and impotence of the single self which "brings its years to
an end like a tale that is told."

Modern culture, in addition to the difficulties in compre-
hending the nature of human selfhood previously discussed,
finds it practically impossible to conceive a frame of meaning
which will do justice to both the private and the collective
drama in which human beings are involved. The reason obvi-
ously is that it tries to comprehend them both in terms of
some fairly simple scheme of rational intelligibility. And the
dramas are so disparate and incommensurate in some of their
dimensions that either the one or the other is unduly sub-
ordinated to the other. Every system of intelligibility must
begin with a starting point and have a terminus of meaning.
Lacking a frame of meaning which is high and broad enough

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE DESTINIES 219

to comprehend both the pathos o individual existence and
the meaning o the total human enterprise, the culture is
forced to treat the historical drama in terms which make
either the individual or the collective enterprise the keystone
of meaning. In the one case, history is interpreted as the
story of the gradual emergence of the individual from every
collective enterprise to become a self-justifying existence. In
the other case, history is regarded as the record of the com-
munity's gradual triumph over the recalcitrant individual. In
both cases the freedom of man is not sufficiently appreciated,
particularly the freedom to pursue particular, as against com-
mon, or universal, ends. Therefore the historical drama is
falsely presented in terms of moral progress, whether indi-
vidual liberty or social harmony is regarded as the moral norm.

For reasons previously discussed, the individualistic inter-
pretation was most popular in the liberal society created by
the commercial classes, while the agrarian classes were more
given to the traditional organic sense of community, and the
industrial workers were attracted by the newer Marxist-in-
spired collectivism. But the individualism of bourgeois cul-
ture could not prevent the emergence of subordinate inter-
pretations which gave meaning to the drama in terms of
subordinating the individual to the community. Sometimes
this was done by promising the individual fulfillment for his
fragmentary life in the community. Sometimes it was done
by pretentious scientists who imagined themselves the master
of historical destiny and regarded ordinary mortals as merely
the stuff of history which would have to be "managed"
toward "socially approved ends."

But these subordinate and tentative collectivist solutions
of the problem have not changed the dominant note of in-
dividualism in bourgeois life. This individualistic creed
imagined the individual self capable of creating communities
by an act of the will, and justified the communities merely
in terms of their support of the individual. The individualism
of the liberal society was prompted by a moral error; and
the technical developments of modern civilization served

220 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

to support the error. The moral error was the notion that
individuals could be self- justifying ends. Immanuel Kant gave
the error classical expression in his dictum: "So act as to
make humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of
another, in every case as the end withal and never as a
means/'

The precept compounded a typically modern error with
a classical Christian truth. The truth is that individuals are
of transcendent worth and that no individual may legiti-
mately use another merely as an instrument of his ends. Even
this truth must be qualified sufficiently, however, to permit
social integration. It is true ultimately, but in the social
dimension individuals must make use of each other. The error
which is compounded with this truth is succinctly expressed
in the Kantian phrase: "Whether in thine own person or
in another.'* For that phrase reveals the incapacity of the
Enlightenment to think "existentially" and therefore to per-
ceive that the same individual who must guard against using
others as means to his ends can not make himself his own
end.

The self is so great and so small that its greatness can not
be contained in its smallness. It can only realize itself by
endlessly being drawn out of itself into larger ends. The
community may provisionally be that larger end. But it can
not be so ultimately. For the community is, though broader
than the individual, also much closer to the necessities of
nature than it. The individual must have a higher end than
the community.

The moral error contained in the Kantian precept was ag-
gravated by the technical developments which created first
a commercial and then an industrial society. The former
emancipated the individual from the bonds of an organic
society and the latter created forms of urban togetherness
which did not necessarily provide the self with community*
In them the individual required an explicit act of the will,
to be delivered from preoccupation with himself. Such an
act of the will is not an impossibility, but it is beyond the

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE DESTINIES 221

moral competence of ordinary mortals. The forces of cohesion
in an organic society are serviceable, not only in providing
for restraints upon the self-will of men, but in drawing indi-
viduals out of the narrow prison of their self-concern. The
spiritual health of a peasant mother compared with the
malaise from which sophisticated cosmopolitans suffer will
illustrate the point.

The isolated individual, lost in an anonymous mass, was
rather a sorry fulfillment of the hopes of the nineteenth cen-
tury. His situation was too untenable to be long maintained.
It was challenged by overt forms of collectivism and by the
further technical developments which added mass communica-
tion to other technical forms of cohesion so that the indi-
vidual, even in a liberal society, was pressed into standards
of conformity which left him even less private room for his
uniqueness than was enjoyed by the peasants of traditional
communities.

These inadvertent forms of totalitarianism, which engulfed
the individual in communities, which were ostensibly devoted
to his freedom, were not as significant, however, as the
more explicit disavowals of individual liberty and worship of
the community which grew on liberal soil, inspired by the
untenable position of the self-justified individual. Long before
the more explicitly collectivist religio-political movements of
Nazism and communism arose, the national loyalty tended to
assume religious dimensions in a community which had only
recently celebrated the emancipation of the individual. The
nationalism of the France of Napoleon in relation to the
revolution which preceded it is a vivid exemplar of the tend-
ency.

The tendency reached its climax in the two totalitarian
movements of contemporary history, Nazism and communism.
Each had its own social causes related to the chaos of national
communities of technical civilization. But both gained some
of their momentum because of the spiritual embarrassment of
the individual in a technical society. Nazism, inspired by a
decadent form of romanticism, persuaded, beguiled and

222 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

forced Individuals of a very advanced Western community
to renounce their individual dignity and freedom for the sake
of establishing the simple communal cohesion of a primitive
society.

Communism, as an economic-political creed, is based upon
the theory that the institution of property is the root of all
social evil and that therefore its abolition would usher in
an ideal social harmony. Marxism as a religio-moral creed
is based upon the illusion that the social solidarity of prim-
itive society expresses the "social essence" of man, from which
he has been "alienated" by the rise of civilization. This typi-
cally romantic theory contains only one half of the truth.

The individual is indeed endangered in his "social es-
sence" by the emancipation from the "primeval we" (Kunkel)
which represents the birth of civilization. But he also comes
to his full state by that emancipation. The communist col-
lectivism which tries to make the community (in this case
something allegedly more universal than the national com-
munity) into the source and end for individual existence
would have been intolerable even if it had not degenerated
into an overt tyranny. For Marxism, without the corruption
of "Stalinism," would yet have expressed the tyranny of Rous-
seau's "General will" which was supposed to provide for a
fulfillment of every particular will but which betrayed the
obtuseness of the whole romantic movement to both the
perils and dignity of the unique individual will.

The communities created by these forms of collectivism
were indeed as free as primitive communities of the friction
created by the competition between particular and parochial
interests which characterizes the complex life of advanced
communities; but they were also bereft of all the richness
and variety of the harmonies and disharmonies of civilized
life. In short, it was even more intolerable to force the in-
dividual to find the final end of his existence in the com-
munity (whether conceived in nationalistic or pseudo-inter-
national terms) than to persuade him to regard his life as a
self-justifying end.

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE DESTINIES 223

The war between these untenable collectivist and individ-
ualistic solutions of the problem of the individual has en-
grossed our generation and has led to consequences of tragic
proportions. The war was prompted by many social causes
which do not concern us here. But in terms of the basic prob-
lem of the relation of the individual to the community and
to the total historical drama, with which we are now con-
cerned, the two errors were caused by the fact that each creed
was blind to one of the two dimensions of human selfhood.
Both understood either the social dimension or the transcend-
ent dimension of the human self. But neither creed under-
stood that the self must both be related to a community and
become progressively related to a more and more inclusive
historical process; but must also have the freedom to transcend
every social process, to seek after unique fulfillments of its
own, to consider the plight of its frustrations which no com-
munal activity can overcome, and to inquire after the mean-
ing of its existence in terms which are finally irrelevant to
any sense of meaning which the community may have.

The contrast between collectivist and individualistic elab-
orations of the same "liberal" creed of the nineteenth century
is dramatically illustrated in the misunderstandings between
Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill. Their philosophy
seemed so similar that Mill at first assumed their conclusions
to be identical. He made very complimentary references to
Comte. But he gradually qualified and then withdrew his
appreciations as he came to realize that Comte's philosophy
tended toward totalitarianism in complete contrast to Mill's
libertarianism. Mill's philosophy was certainly more tenable
than that of Comte. But Mill was blind to the creative aspects
of community, and Comte was blind to the dimension of
transcendence of the individual over the community. It was
not possible to contain both dimensions within a simple
system of rational intelligibility.

The fate of the individual in Western civilization has for-
tunately not been completely determined by the strife be-
tween, and the inadequacies of, these warring creeds. The

224 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

relatively tolerable condition of individual existence has been
due in part to the richness of the culture which armed the
individual with the competence and inclination to stand his
ground against the community and which endowed him with
possibilities of scientific and artistic creativity in which he
could fulfill his life. It has been due in part to the remnants
of a Christian-Biblical faith which the force of modern "secu-
larism" was powerless to destroy and which endowed him with
both a source of authority which could persuade him to defy
the community with a resolute "we must obey God rather
than man/' and with a sense of meaning which made him
independent of the structures of meaning which the com-
munity constructed for him.

We have previously analyzed the unique affirmation of
mystery and meaning which characterizes Biblical faith. We
must now consider the resources of that faith for the solu-
tion of the problem of the individual and the community.
This is a problem because any system of rational intelligibility
which seeks to comprehend the disparate and incommensurate
entities of the individual and the community into one sys-
tem of coherence is tempted to make either one or the
other unduly subordinate to the other. A system broad
enough to provide a frame of meaning for the collective
drama is not high enough to give significance to the inde-
terminate possibilities of both good and evil of individual
life. A system which, on the other hand, takes cognizance of
the indeterminate possibilities of self-transcendence of the
individual easily degenerates into a mystical affirmation of
ultimates and universals which rob both the individual and
the collective drama of any specific meaning.

Biblical faith combines a sense of mystery with specific
meaning. It asserts that the divine mystery of creation and of
the judgement sensed by the individual in the height of his
self-consciousness has been clarified by a specific historical
drama; that in the life, death and resurrection of Christ we
have the key to the mercy and love of God whom we have
previously known as the power of creation and as ultimate
judge. This is the "light that shineth in darkness." This is

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE DESTINIES 225

the key to the mystery which does not however transmute
mystery into rational intelligibility. It merely relates the ulti-
mate mystery to the mystery of the human drama so that the
one makes sense out of the other. Naturally, this key must
be accepted "by faith/' There is no way of convincing the
mind to accept the key by proving it to be the necessary logi-
cal consequence of an analysis of structures and coherences.
For we are dealing with a realm of freedom and mystery
beyond all structures except the patterns and themes of
history.

The frame of meaning established by Biblical faith is
able to give meaning to both the individual and the col-
lective dramas of history. The God who created the world
has the power of a higher majesty than that of the nations.
"He bringeth the princes to naught," declares the prophet
Isaiah, "and maketh the judges of the earth as vanity." But
the majesty of His mercy and love is one with the majesty of
His power. The Christian faith is primarily the acceptance
of a divine mercy, of the assurance that the variance between
the human and the divine Will has been overcome by the
divine mercy. The divine mercy proceeds from the same love
which is the criterion of judgements for every individual life.
This love is the norm which establishes a frame of meaning
for the individual. It makes the dignity of human freedom
comprehensible because it establishes an environment above
the obvious structures of nature for that freedom. But it also
discerns that there is misery in this dignity; that there is both
the power and inclination of self-concern in the same freedom
which is the basis of human creativity.

There is, in short, in the key of meaning to the ultimate
mystery a center for historical meaning as well. That is the
significance of Christ as both human and divine. And the
historical meaning, which is established, is broad enough
for the whole historical drama, high enough to contain the
freedom of the individual and realistic enough to discern
the corruptions of freedom in human history.

If the individual rises above the courts and judgements o
the community to appeal to a more ultimate judgement

226 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

("With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of
men; yea I judge not mine own self, for I know nothing b^
myself; he that judgeth me is the Lord," declares St. Paul) ,
he faces a judgement more, rather than less, severe than the
judgements of the community. He is judged by the norm of
the love of the neighbor. The neighbor may be some fellow
man whom the community does not recognize. But he may
also represent the members of the community which is pass-
ing the judgements upon his conduct. The ultimate judge-
ments which are interpreted by the key of the Christ revela-
tion can, in short, never be socially irrelevant. They can not
prompt the individual to defy the community for the sake
of his own * 'pursuit of happiness"; nor do they prompt him
to flee the collective enterprises and perplexities of men to
escape into some realm of "eternal bliss." The believer is
indeed promised the "peace of God which passeth understand-
ing." It passes understanding, however, precisely because
it is a peace which contains the pains and sorrows of suffering
love. For the believer is challenged to become engaged in
the sorrows and sufferings of the world. He worships a God
whose peace is not some supernal equanimity of detachment.
It is the peace of the triumph of the Cross.

The fact that the frame of meaning provided by the Chris-
tian faith clarifies the collective and the individual dimen-
sions of the human drama and that it discerns the possibili-
ties of both good and evil in it, that it therefore gives the
basis for a tolerable solution of the problem of the individual
and the community for which modern culture could find
no satisfying solution, may justify the faith by inference.
But we face the interesting situation upon which we dwelt in
another context that this faith may be justified but can not
be established by inference. No analysis of the inadequacies
of alternatives can persuade the believer to believe that
Christ is the key to the ultimate mystery and to the meaning
of his own life.

The adventure of faith must remain an adventure, however
much it may be supported by inferential evidence. The in-
dividual has a freedom and loneliness of freedom which make

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE DESTINIES 227

all social correlations and processes inadequate bases of mean-
ing. In addition he faces the contradiction between this
greatness and the brevity of his life. He is so great and yet
so small. He may be "fearfully and wonderfully made," but
that does not save him from "bringing his years to an end
like a tale that is told." To these perplexities one more must
be added. Partly consciously and partly unconsciously he
complicates his problem by abortive efforts to solve it through
the man's assertion of his strength or wisdom or virtue. Yet
every effort to hide or to deny the fragmentary character o
his life increases the pain and sorrow of life. This situation
may drive some men to despair and may prompt others to
embrace Christ as the key to the mystery. But the alterna-
tives which seek to give meaning to human existence by cor-
relating the individual and the collective dramas, or by
equating man's freedom with his mind, or by deriving the
evil in him from the inertias of "nature," are obviously inade-
quate to satisfy anyone who is inclined to look honestly at
the antinomies and tragedies of human existence.

In this post-Christian era, in which a scientific culture
is preoccupied with systems of coherence and seeks to reduce
these systems to simpler and simpler proportions, it would
be idle to speculate on the possibility of many people, par-
ticularly "representative people/' finding their way back
to a faith which doubly offends the pride of man. It offends
the pride of perennial man by convicting him of a lack of
virtue on which he relies for his self-respect. And it offends
the pride of modern man by convicting his rational faculty of
inadequacy both in guaranteeing his virtue and in making
sense out of the strange drama of his existence.

The thesis that the Christian faith offers an adequate frame
of meaning for the comprehension of both the individual and
the collective drama and for an understanding of the relation
between the two, does not imply that every problem of the
relation of the individual to the community is solved by
such a faith. The gradual gain by the individual of a toler-
able security against the community and of a tolerable free-
dom to develop his own uniqueness was frequently won in

228 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

the teeth of religious opposition; and there was good reason
for resisting the unqualified claims of the individual, at least
provisionally. For on both the religious and the moral level
it was necessary to do justice to the social and transcendent
dimensions of selfhood before a satisfactory solution of the
individual and the community could be achieved. The experi-
ence of God can not be coerced or even induced by the
community, whether political or ecclesiastical. In that sense,
religion is "what man does with his solitariness" (Whitehead) ;
and the Reformation is justified in insisting on "evangelical"
liberty for the individual, that is, for the right to appropriate
the divine pardon upon contrition, without the mediation
of church or priest. But private religious experience may be
a capricious "wish fulfillment." It requires the discipline
of the community of believers. Christianity, in common with
Judaism, is, moreover, dependent upon the norm of an his-
torical revelation.

Thus even the Reformation, despite its principle of the
"priesthood of all believers," did not abolish or diminish the
significance of the Church while limiting its authority in the
ultimate sphere and denying it the competence to give and
to withhold forgiveness in God's name.

When the Catholic Church speaks of liberty, it is thinking
of the liberty of the person to seek his "eternal end" beyond
the temporal and immediate ends of the political order. This
acknowledgement of an end, transcendent to the purposes
and projects of the political community, marks the radical
difference between an authoritarian religious community and
a totalitarian political community. The difference in estab-
lishing the humanity of the person is tremendous and not
sufficiently appreciated by modern anti-authoritarians. It must
be appreciated even though it is recognized that an authori-
tarian religion may be too blind to the pinnacle of individual
uniqueness in the religious life and to the inability of any
religious community guaranteeing the repentance, trust, and
new life, which is the mark of a genuine encounter between
the self and God according to Biblical faith.

We face the same difficulties on the moral as on the re-

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE DESTINIES 229

ligious level, and in the realm of "civil" as well as in the
realm, of "evangelical" liberty. The Reformation was so
polemical in its protests against ecclesiastical authority, and
Luther was so preoccupied with his theory of the "two realms"
that the Lutheran Reformation, at least, tended to deny any
relevance between "evangelical" and "civil" liberty. For the
"earthly" realm of civil life was under the control of "the
sword, the law, chains and courts" and nothing was sup-
posedly known in it of "forgiveness, pardon and mercy."

Later Calvinism, of course, drew other conclusions. John
Milton's spiritual services to the democratic idea was based
primarily upon his Christian conviction that God had given
the person a transcendent worth and related him to a tran-
scendent authority which the state must honor. Significantly,
he used the text which for Luther meant the rigorous sep-
aration of the two realms: "Give unto Caesar the things that
are Caesar's; and to God the things that are God's," to draw
different conclusions and to claim liberty of conscience from
the political community. "My conscience I have from God,"
declared Milton, "and therefore I can not submit it to Caesar."
A free society could not have been created without this con-
viction. It prompted the individual to defy the community
on crucial issues of conscience. It also finally persuaded the
political community to have some reverence for the sanctity
of the individual conscience. This self-limitation of the
state in approaching the conscience of the individual has come
to be one of the chief marks of distinction between an open
society and a totalitarian one. Yet the conscience of the in-
dividual is not as infallible as the strict libertarians imply.
It is not even infallible when it is ostensibly informed by a
genuine desire to submit to a higher divine judgement. There-
fore even the most democratic states have learned to insist
on certain standards of common decency and public order
even against the dictates of religiously inspired conscience.
Furthermore, the most effective opposition to tyrants in recent
decades has come not so much from isolated individuals, but
from individuals whose conscience was formed by political,
scientific, cultural, and religious communities. There is, in

230 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

short, no dimension of existence in which the individual is
purely an individual and is not in need of either material or
spiritual and moral support from some community. This is
one of many reasons why the cherished civil freedom of
open communities is meant for its subordinate communities
as much as for individuals. We may conclude that the higher
the level of consciousness, the more unique the individual
becomes, in which case the religious level is the most gen-
uinely individual. But we must understand that even on
this level (about which Luther observed that men face the
fear of death alone) the solitary soul is in need of both
sympathy and instruction from its fellows.

These complexities offer some explanation for the slow
and tortuous progress of Christian communities toward an
adequate solution of the problem of relating the individual
to the community without endangering the integrity of the
one or the good order of the other.

But it is not only because the testimony of Christian faith
recognizes the ambiguities of life that the path was tortuous
and the progress slow. Another reason was that with religious
faith alone, without the support of the competence and
creativity with which cultural disciplines endow the individ-
ual, he can not maintain himself against the immense weight
of communal authority. He requires two, and not one, weapons
in his armor. He must have the weapon of religiously inspired
self-respect against the pretensions of the community, but he
must also have the critical competence to arrive at conclusions
independent of the decrees of custom and the authority of
traditions; and he must have creative resources in the arts and
crafts, in science and in culture to make his own unique
contributions to the life of the community. These resources
are not supplied by any faith but by the disciplines of culture.
It is therefore idle to attribute the self-respect and integrity
of the individual in an open society to either the one or the
other of the two sources of his independence. The independ-
ence which is derived from artistic or scientific competence
has been honored and guarded by modern democratic com-
munities with less reluctance as communities belatedly dis-

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE DESTINIES 231

covered that the community would ultimately benefit from
activities of individuals in which it had no immediate interest
and which it was tempted to regard as a threat to its obvious
interests and order. The technological competence of modern
communities rests upon the pursuits of pure science, devel-
oped by the inquisitiveness, the ingenuity and the creativity
of individuals who were not prompted by any immediate
communal purpose. The richness and variety of a culture,
ultimately beneficial to the community, depend upon a
freedom of the artists to pursue goals not immediately bene-
ficial to the community. The Nazis benefited from a tech-
nology which was itself parasitic on the purer sciences which
had been developed in freedom. Even a democratic society
like our own may find to its sorrow that a too frantic effort
to enlist the scientists for the defensive purposes of atomic
wars may imperil the advances in nuclear physics on which
the competence in the construction of atomic weapons depends.
If the security of the conscience of the individual against
the perils of communal oppression remains a perpetual prob-
lem in even "open" societies, the community has a contrast-
ing problem of appropriating the dictates of the individual's
conscience for its own good order and health. This is a problem
because the conscience of the individual frequently, if not
usually, functions in terms which are irrelevant to the ends
of the community. The reason for this irrelevance can be
easily stated. The individual, when considering a moral prob-
lem ultimately, finds every form of self-assertion to be suspect
before the judgement seat of conscience. The community,
on the other hand, must establish some kind of harmony and
justice within its own boundaries by encouraging an equilib-
rium of power among competitive forms of self-interest. And
when the community's relationship to other communities is
weighed (the national community being the chief modern
exemplar of the most powerful community) , the question
always arises whether the willingness to sacrifice self-interest
for the general good, which is the final norm for the indi-
vidual, is really a possibility for the nation. For the force
of alter-egoisni in powerful communities is such that the high-

232 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTQRY

est possibility would seem to be that they find a point of con-
currence between their own and a more universal interest.
It is significant, at least, that it is not generally expected of
nations that they subordinate their interests to the com-
munity of mankind. The highest desideratum seems to be
a sufficiently prudent self-interest to prompt actions which
will ultimately, though not necessarily immediately, benefit
both the limited and the universal community.

This conflict between individual and social morality is not
caused, as some critics would claim, by the Christian error
of proposing an impossible norm for both the individual
and the community, the norm of sacrificial love as exempli-
fied in the Cross of Christ. The problem would not be solved
even if a more possible norm would be set first for the
individual, but most definitely for the community. The fact
is that the revelation of the "Cross of Christ" does not super-
impose, but merely clarifies, the truth about man's situation
when ultimately considered. The situation which is clarified
by the Christian faith can be validated by common experi-
ence. It is that the self is bound to destroy itself by seeking
itself too narrowly, that it must forget itself to realize itself,
but that this self-forgetfulness can not be induced by the
calculation that a more ultimate form of self-realization will
flow from the forgetfulness. The ethic of the Cross therefore
clarifies, but does not create, a norm which is given by the
very constitution of selfhood. It is this constitution which
prevents the self from ever finding virtue or happiness or self-
realization by seeking them too directly or insistently. It is
this constitution of selfhood which makes "grace," including
common grace, a more effective instrument of redemption
than prudence. This is so clear that even a culture which
glorifies prudence manages to give an inadvertent honor to
heroes and martyrs, to brave men and those who were heedless
of their interests. Thus the final paradox of human selfhood
shines through even in cultures which have no way of
appreciating any wisdom of life above the level of prudence.

The conflict between the conscience of the individual and
the community must not be abolished, for it is a source

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE DESTINIES 233

of wisdom and grace for both the individual and the com-
munity. But it can be prevented from becoming a source
of confusion in the moral and religious life of mankind by
clarifying some facts about both the individual and the com-
munity which both Christians and rationalistic forms of per-
fectionism have obscured.

The obvious fact about the individual is that no one com-
pletely fulfills the norm which is given in the very consti-
tution of selfhood. Everyone is involved in the sin of grasp-
ing after self-realization too immediately and too clamantly.
We are thus involved in, even if we do not consciously recog-
nize the validity of, the law of love. We may not recognize this
contradiction between our acceptance of the law and our in-
evitable betrayal of it, except when we consider ourselves ulti-
mately, that is in prayer. In that experience we become aware of
the fact that "there is a law in my members which wars against
the law that is in my mind." We know that the "love of
Christ" is not a simple possibility for us. It is, on the one
hand, the revelation of ultimate possibilities and, on the
other hand, the revelation of a divine mercy which under-
stands us in the inevitable contradiction in which even the
most perfect life is involved. When this fact is clearly under-
stood about the individual self, one of the main sources of
confusion about the demands of individual conscience and
political morality is removed. For even a very sensitive
Christian understands that the community is forced to deal
with precisely these residual self-interests of even the most
perfect men. It must harness, deflect, balance and beguile
these various competitive interests for the sake of a tolerable
harmony and justice.

Orthodox Christianity, whether Protestant or Catholic, may
have been involved in various errors of obscurantism or
literalism, and may have been blind to social complexities
which a scientific culture has explored. But it has been a
source of wisdom to the community as long as it preserved
the Biblical estimate of the capacity for both love and self-
love of the self which both modern secularism and liberal
Protestantism have obscured.

234 THE SELF AND THE PRAMAS OF HISTORY

The wisdom drawn from this Biblical account of selfhood
is not only relevant to the elaboration of a political morality
which both protects the self in its dignity and protects the
community against the self-regard of the self. It is relevant to
social relations in even such an intimate group as the family.
A loving mother will deal wisely with a rebellious adolescent
child if she understands that the rebellion is an inevitable
assertion of the child's ego but also a natural reaction to the
power impulses in the love of even the most loving parents.
Furthermore, the mother will not allow the "sacrifices" of her
love to be the occasion for encouraging heedlessness toward
the right of others in her children. The mother of more than
one child will soon discover, moreover, that a calculus of
justice is a necessary instrument of even the most disinter-
ested love. In this way the ultimate dimension of the ethical
life must be related to the proximate ends of a tolerable
peace and justice.

The organization of these proximate ends naturally re-
quires an astute estimate of the interests and rights which
are in competition with each other and of the probable
consequences of any given course of action. Therefore intel-
lectual disciplines are increasingly necessary instruments of
social morality, the more intricate social relations become. But
no intellectual analysis can eliminate the ultimate paradox
between prudence and "grace," between justice and love, in
the moral life of man. That paradox consists in the fact that
heedless love is at once the fulfillment and the negation
of justice; and that mercy and forgiveness are at once the
fulfillment and negation of punitive justice.

The social relations within a community can be ordered
more wisely if the individual is known in terms of both his
capacity for love and for self-love. The ethic of the com-
munity (in the contemporary instance, the national com-
munity) in its relation to other communities can be estimated
wisely only if it is understood in what sense the community,
as such, has a "conscience" or moral sense. It obviously does
not have a conscience in the full sense in which the individual
possesses it. It lacks such a conscience because it has a more

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE DESTINIES 255

developed organ of will (the state) than of the further self-
transcendence which is tantamount to conscience. The moral
sense of the community is constituted of its traditions plus
the competitive ideas of its various citizens as individuals
about what the conduct of the community should be. The force
of alter-egoism colors the moral testimonies of these indi-
viduals in such a way that they frequently define the right
conduct for the nation in selfish terms, partly because that
conduct would be unselfish for them and partly because the
conduct would be a collective expression for an unconscious
and suppressed individual self-regard. All these complexities,
together with the confusion of counsel within the nation
about its collective actions, make it inevitable that the moral
sense of the community should be at a lower level than that
of the individual, and that a wise self-interest which can
find the point of concurrence between a particular and a gen-
eral interest, should represent the summum bonum of the
community rather than sacrificial love. It must be observed
however that if the conscience of individuals within the com-
munity does not operate to concern life within it with the
welfare of life outside of it, the collective self-concern of the
nation will express itself in narrower and more self-defeating
terms. That is why love can not be declared irrelevant even
for the life of the community (chiefly the modern nation)
and why the individual conscience must be concerned with
the conduct of the community even if its dictates in their
purest form are not directly relevant.

It is partly because individuals set higher goals than
the community is able to realize that we have the problem of
utopianism in modern culture. But this problem is partly
due to the very structure of human selfhood. Not only for
the community but for himself the individual persists in en-
tertaining ideals which are beyond his capacities. "Our reach
is beyond our grasp/' declares Browning, "or what's a heaven
for?" The hope of heaven and the modern man's hope of a
heaven on earth are obviously expressions of the same inner
necessities of selfhood. The human drama in both its indi-
vidual and collective terms constantly sets tangents of mean-

236 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

ing which remain unfulfilled in the limits o nature-history.
The Renaissance culture began with the supposition that the
extravagance of human hopes was the cause of human ills.
"You have set your ladders into heaven/' declared Cosinio de
Medici, the harbinger of modern culture. "We will not
strive so high or fall so low."

It must be regarded as an ironic refutation of Cosimo's
prescription for virtue that one part of the Renaissance cul-
ture consistently moderated the "reach" so that it would not
be beyond the "grasp" of man; and that strategy, consistently
applied, ended in Nazi cruelty. Nazism significantly prided
itself upon having disavowed Anglo-Saxon "hypocrisy" which
may be defined as the pretension of having a grasp equal to
the reach. The other part of the culture built more absurd
"ladders to heaven" than the Christians whom Cosimo crit-
icized. And these ladders to heaven proved an even greater
source of confusion than either the Christian ones or the
Nazi disavowal of every kind of moral or religious ladder.
These contradictory developments prove that the relation of
the reach to the grasp is an unsolved problem of man's
existence.

The answer of Biblical faith to this problem has long since
been discarded even by some Christians, and regarded as
completely irrelevant by moderns. The Christians (and the
Jews for that matter) found the idea of the "resurrection of
the body" so irrational that they fled o the Hellenic con-
ception of the "immortality of the soul," though the immor-
tality conceived by Plato was certainly not of the self, and
it annulled man's collective history as well as his unique
selfhood.

We must remember that all hopes and ideas conceived
from within the temporal process of a system of meaning
which transcends the temporal flux, are "irrational." At least
they are not simply rational. With this presupposition we
may well approach the Biblical hope afresh to see whether
it may give us a keystone to the arch for the understanding
of human selfhood.

The Christian hope is derived from the Christian revela-

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE DESTINIES 237

tion of the meaning in the divine mystery. That revelation
is centered in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Con-
fidence that the crucified Savior was "raised again" is the
very basis of the faith which gathered the first believing com-
munity. Yet honest scholarship must admit that the resur-
rection is not as well attested as an historical event as the
crucifixion. There is the question whether the experience of
the "living Lord" was not the private experience of his
disciples and was later justified and made more vivid by the
story of the empty tomb. If this be true, it is significant for
the very quality of the Christian faith in boldly asserting
that there is a realm of meaning, transcending nature-history
and defined by the purposes of the God who has a freedom
beyond the coherences of nature, in which the crucified
Savior is alive and "sitteth at the right hand of God." He is
apprehended not only as a specific individual whose life has
power beyond the grave, but as the key to the ultimate mys-
tery of God and history. Naturally this whole revelatory
drama presupposes, and would not be thinkable without,
the Hebraic-Messianic hope of the resurrection in the Mes-
sianic age.

Before this hope is dismissed as utterly incredible, it would
be well to recognize that it brings to a climax one of the
basic characteristics of the Biblical faith, namely, its lack of
logical coherence and its consequent "empirical" superiority
in comprehending facts which can not be brought into logical
coherence. The facts about the self which the idea of the
resurrection clarifies, are all important for the understanding
of the antinomies of the human self. They are: (A) The self
in its final freedom transcends the conditions o nature-time
and can not be fulfilled within them. (B) The self has a
unity between this freedom of the spirit and the organism
of its body and soul, which makes the emancipation o an
immortal soul from a mortal body unthinkable. Therefore
the ultimate hope is expressed in the idea of a transfigured
body. "It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body,"
declares St. Paul (I Corinthians 15:44) . Thus the unthinkable
idea of the resurrection of the body guards and supports the

238 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

unthinkable but directly experienced idea of the unity of the
self as animal organism and as free spirit. (C) The freedom
of the self is not merely a dignity which must be asserted
in defiance of death. It contains a corruption of self-concern
which is revealed to be ultimately culpable, even though it may
be justified in immediate instances. Therefore the death and
resurrection of Christ is felt to be symbolic of the dying of
the self to its narrow self, that it may truly live. "I am cruci-
fied with Christ; nevertheless I live," declared St. Paul. This
emancipation from self and the revelation of a divine mercy
which understands that the emancipation is never complete,
is a more primary assurance of the "kerygma" than the hope
of the resurrection. The creed ends with three affirmations in
a significant order: "I believe in ... the forgiveness of sins:
the resurrection of the body: and the life everlasting." Comple-
tion of the human story without the forgiveness of sin would
be unthinkable. The Gospel, in short, both guards the dignity
of the self which transcends death and recognizes the misery
of the self, which faces the problem of sin, as well as the fact
of death. The tendency to disregard this part of the Gospel
invariably reduces the Christian faith to the affirmation of the
"spiritual" character of man against the threat of death.

(D) The resurrection of the individual is incredibly related
to a ''general" resurrection which completes the whole human
story, and which is associated with the "coming again" of the
suffering Savior in triumph "with great power and glory."
This hope implies that the antinomies of history will express
themselves to the end but are not able finally to overcome the
meaning of human existence. The antinomies are not caused
by the inertia of nature against the freedom of spirit. They
are therefore not overcome by man's gradual triumph over
nature. They grow with that triumph so that the most ex-
plicit evil, the "anti-Christ," appears just at the end of his-
tory. One need hardly analyze our current perplexities and
the perils of tyranny and atomic destruction to prove that
this incredible hope for the end of history is more in accord
with actual experience than the alternative hopes which have
beguiled, and then disappointed, past generations.

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE DESTINIES 239

A concluding word must be said about the intimate rela-
tion between the hope of the fulfillment of individual self-
hood with the hope for the fulfillment of the whole historical
drama. How incredible and how valid this combination of
hopes is! It is valid precisely because the individual self is
grounded in a collective history as surely as it is based in a
physical organism. Its fulfillment is not possible without the
fulfillment of the whole drama, yet the fulfillment of the
total drama offers no adequate completion of meaning for the
unique individual. One is reminded in this instance of the
many humble souls of either pathetic or noble proportions.
Historians may fit the lives of the thinkers and the states-
men of history into some kind of correlation which endows
their lives with meaning. But what is to be done about the
humble spirits who do not rise to the height to be fitted into
these correlations and schemes of meaning? And for that mat-
ter what is to be done with these same statesmen and philoso-
phers insofar as they are anxious individuals rather than
great thinkers and doers? How, in other words, can we bring
the whole human story, including all the relevant and irrele-
vant individual dramas, into some scheme of intelligibility
without obscuring and denying the richness and variety of
the drama? The hope of the forgiveness of sins and life
everlasting is thus a fitting climax of the faith that there is a
meaning to the story beyond our understanding of its mean-
ing because it is grounded in a power and purpose beyond
our comprehension, though not irrelevant to all our frag-
mentary meanings. It is the final venture in modesty for the
mysterious human self, which understands itself more com-
pletely if it understands that there are heights and depths
of human selfhood which are beyond any system of rational
intelligibility, but not beyond the comprehension of faith and
hope.

The question about interpreting human selfhood and its
dramas within either a framework of rational intelligibility
or a framework of meaning and mystery, which is the ques-
tion between modern culture and faiths which are rooted in
the Bible, can be briefly summarized. There are directly

240 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

experienced realities in the realm of selfhood which point
beyond any system of rational intelligibility to mystery, and
they create a sense of meaning and mystery in which the one
penetrates the other. Such realities or "facts" are the free-
dom and responsibility of the self, its sin and guilt, the unity
of its freedom and its physical organism, and the variegated
dramas and dialogues of which it is capable. These facts can
not be contained in a system of rational intelligibility because
there are no causal sequences and coherences which could
contain the facts.

The systems proposed by classical or modern philosophers
or scientists invariably deny or obscure some directly experi-
enced facts for the sake of the coherence of the system. The
facts point beyond themselves to a realm of mystery. But
pure mystery destroys meaning as surely as pure intelligibility.
The genius of Biblical faith is that it discerns by faith,
glimpses of meaning in the ultimate mystery ("the light that
shineth in darkness") which furnish the keys to the under-
standing of directly experienced realities. The fragmentari-
ness and brevity of life, united to its dignity, is a mystery
which is made meaningful by the promise of a fulfillment
which is beyond the capacity of man. His sin and guilt are
intolerable burdens without forgiveness which is available to
those who acknowledge rather than hide the ultimate pre-
dicament of man. The dramas of man's history can be ex-
plained by discerning various patterns in history, but they are
too multifarious to fit into any of these patterns. They can
be fitted into a framework of meaning only if the meaning
has a penumbra of mystery. The mystery consists of a power
and a love beyond our comprehension which overrules these
various historical dramas. The relation of the creative power
to the redemptive love is also a mystery without the appre-
hension of which the whole of history falls into meaningless-
ness.

The hope that both the individual and the total drama of
life will end in "the forgiveness of sins: the resurrection of
the body: and the life everlasting," is thus the natural fruit of

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE DESTINIES 241

the faith that there is a height and depth o reality in God in
which the individual in his uniqueness and freedom has a
reality which the coherences of nature and reason do not
assure him, and in which the endless dramatic variations of
his collective life also have significance ultimately.

The Biblical faith makes the affirmation not only about
the divine life which assures significance to selfhood and its
dramas, but it also insists that the God who is powerful
enough to bring the fragmentary dialogues and dramas to
a conclusion also has a power of love which is able to over-
come the recalcitrance of human sin.

There is no way of making either this faith or this hope
"rational" by analyzing the coherences of nature and of rea-
son. Efforts to do so inevitably result in some form of very
attenuated philosophy and religion in which some of the ex-
perienced incoherences of life are obscured by the philosophi-
cally established coherences. One may only validate such a
faith inferentially by calling attention to the fact that it
answers the ultimate problems of the human self, which also
has an incredible but directly experienced freedom, unity of
freedom and finiteness and the capacity to elaborate endless
dramas which do not fit into any pattern of nature and
reason.

The fact that the individual feels his life to be fragmentary,
despite its fulfillments in the community and in the historical
process, proves that the self has a dimension which does not fit
into any historical correlations. The divine power and love
which gives this freedom meaning must be apprehended by
faith. The reality of this power can be proved inferentially in
the sense that any meaning which is imparted to life, purely
in terms of the historical flux, can be proved to be a too simple
meaning.

The fact that the self s freedom is involved in the contra-
diction of self-love is established by any careful observation of
human history. But the self does not acknowledge itself to be
implicated in this contradiction except in an encounter with
the God who stands above all the historical judgements.

242 THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

The self is involved in, and creates, various historical
dramas which are known to have meaning. But the meaning
which is ascribed to them is usually too simple if the frame of
meaning consists merely of the correlations which may be
charted by historical observation. Certainly the idea of prog-
ress which was the regulative religious idea of the past decades
is an inadequate principle of meaning for the realities of an
age which faces the dangers of atomic wars.

The unity of the self in its freedom and its natural and
historical structure certainly invalidates all hopes of heaven
which rest upon the idea that an immortal "soul" or mind may
escape a mortal body. Thus the Biblical faith and hope, which
gives meaning to human existence, may be proved inferentially
to be true, or to be more in accord with experienced facts
than alternative faith and hopes. But these inferences can not
force the self to commit itself to them. The Biblical faith must
remain a commitment of the self rather than a conclusion of
its mind. Only such a commitment can do justice to the self's
freedom and its discontinuity with the coherences and struc-
tures of the temporal world. The commitment is not possible
without the prerequisite of repentance because the darkness
about the meaning of its existence is due not so much to the
finiteness of the self's mind as to pretensions of its heart. It is
because men "became vain in their imaginations, and their
foolish heart was darkened" (Romans 1:21) that they found
such great difficulty in recognizing the true Author and end of
their existence and the Divine Judge of the actions.

The dramas of history contain many facts and sequences
which must be rationally correlated. But the frame of meaning
in which these facts and sequences are discerned must be ap-
prehended by faith because it touches the realm of mystery
beyond rational comprehension. The ultimate question always
remains whether the mystery is so absolute as to annul the
meaning of the historical drama or whether there is a key of
meaning in the mystery, a "light that shineth in darkness/'
which clarifies, rather than annuls, all the strange and vari-
egated dramas of human history.

INDEX

Agape, 31 f, 95

"Love of Christ," 156
America,

influence of Enlightenment on,
212-213

problem of "co-existence" with

East, 213-214
Amos, 83
Anaxagoras, 82
Anthropology, 14, 42
Anthropomorphism, 81
Anxiety, 21-22
Aquinas, Thomas, 101, 102
Aristotle, 4, 5, 48-49, 75-76, 82, 83-84

in the Middle Ages, 101, 104

Phiha, 31

reason, 3

slavery, 150
Asia, 209-210
Atomic weapons, 202
Augustine, 99 ff, 167-168, 218

Bacon, Francis, 104, 114
Balzac, 42
Barth, Karl, 108
Benedict, Ruth, 132 n.
Benevolence, 185 .
Bennett, J. W., 15
Bergson, H , 17 n.
Biblical Faith, 71, 224 ff.
Biography, 47, 48
"Bondage of the Will," 18
Bowers, Claude, 54
Bradley, F. H., 62, 122
Briffault, R., 150
Buber, M., 88
Bultmann, R., 97
Burckhardt, J , 47
Burke, E., 149, 177, 189
Burrow, Tngant, 142 n.

Calvin, John, 173
Catholic Church, 55-57, 102 f.,
185 ff.

and authority of kings, 171

as force of conservatism, 167 f.,
170

on liberty, 228 f
Chamberlain, Neville, 47
Christ, 224 ff.

anti-Christ, 239

ethic of cross of, 232 f

love of, no simple possibility,
233 ff.

resurrection and selfhood, 237 ff.
Churchill, Winston, 43, 47-48, 214
Classes, 36, 151 f

struggle of, 194 ff.
Glutton-Brock, 109
Collmgwood, R. G., 57-58
Communism, 42, 125, 202, 208 .,
222

illusion of community with, 205

its "messianism," 63

"Marxist-Leninist Science," 124

not principally a military move-
ment, 210
Community, 38 f , 148 ff.

authoritarian, 228

British, 40

conscience of, 235 f.

covenant, 92

Hegel on, 35

Jewish, 40

open, 230 i

relation of individual to, 220 f

resistance to tyranny, 230

symbols of, 177

totalitarian, 221 ff.

types of, 219

world, 203 ff., 219
Comte, A., 42, 120

relation to J. S. Mill, 223
Conant, James B., 114
Condor cet, 119, 150
Congress of Industrial Organiza-
tions, 46

243

244

THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

Conscience, 12 ff., 16, 37, 229 ff.
Covenant, 66, 85, 87-88
Cromwell, Oliver, 54-55
"Cultural lag," 203
Cummings, E. E, 134 n.

Dante, 104, 170

Darlan, Admiral, 48

Darwimanism, 109

de Medici, Cosimo, 236

de Tocqueville, Alexis, 210-211

Declaration of Independence, 39

Depth psychology, 8-11

Descartes, R, 59, 115-117

Determinism, 41, 49

Dewey, John, 83, 115, 137-138

"Diggers," 192

Dilthey, 57

Dogma, 92-93

Economics, 45, 46, 136
"Egoism," 133 ff.
Eisenhower, D D , 214 n.
Electoral College, 178
Empiricism, 5, 104, 110, 114 f , 152
and the responsible, free self, 129-

130
Existentialism, 67

Faith, 66

"Fall" of Man, 99 f

compared with Promethean myth,

79-80
Family, 191

role of mother in, 234
Ferrero, G., 169 n.
Fichte, 24

"Fideism," 98, 106, 111
Fisher, H. A. L., 50
Flaubert, 42
Frankfort, H., 78, 168
Freedom, 42, 43, 61 ff., 128 f
French Enlightenment, 117 ff., 166

Encyclopedists of, 181

illusions of, 154
Freud, Sigmund, 8-11, 18, 139 n.

influence on social sciences, 142
Freudianism, 130, 143, 144
Fromm, Erich, 139

Gorer, G., 143 n.
Gouzenko, Igor, 189
Greek,

city-states, 83

component of Christianity, 75 f.

non-naturalistic philosophers, 23

nous, 81

Hayes, Carleton, 54
Hegel, 24, 35, 121 ff.
Heidigger, 68
Heschel, Abraham, 87 n.
Highet, G., 81
Hindu, 69
Historians, 45, 50
Historical causation, 44-45
Historical prediction, 46
History, theories of,

Hegelian, 50

"ideological elements in," 57 ff.

interpretation of, 54, 55, 57 f.

"progress" in, 51, 156

Social Darwinist, 50, 120
Hitler, A , 15, 16, 43, 58-59
Hobbes, T., 17, 20, 115-116, 165,

198

Hocking, W. E., 23
Hooker, Richard, 180 f.
Homey, K, 140, 141
Huckleberry Finn, 16-17
Hume, D , 14, 61
Huxley, Aldous, 42, 64, 69

Idolatry, 63, 67
"Image of God/' 4-5
Immortality,
contrasted with resurrection, 78,

236-237

Imperial religions, 63
Imperialism, 209
Ireton, 179
Isaiah, 83, 225

Jacobins, 193
Jaeger, W., 82 n.
Jaspers, K, 110-111
Jeremiah, 86, 107
Jewish legahsm, 88
Johannme literature, 94 ff.

INDEX

245

John, 66, 95

Jones, Ernest, 11 n.

Judeo-Chnstian Faith, 64-67, 68,

84 ff.

and modern community, 224 ff.
antidote to modern illusions, 158
compared with Hellenic, 77 ff.,

159 f
post-Christian era, 227

Kant, 24, 62, 151, 220
Kerygma, 97
Kierkegaard, 65
Kluckhohn, Clyde, 131 n.
Knox, John, 172
Kunkel, Fritz, 222

Laissez faire, 41

Lee, Robert E., 54

"Levellers," 192

"Liberty and equality," 151 f., 200

Liliburne, John, 188

Lincoln, Abraham, 39

Gettysburg Address, 39, 54
Lindbergh, Charles A., 26-29
Locke, John, 165, 184, 191
Logical positivists, 53
Logos, 94-95
Lucretius, 113

Luther, Martin, 56, 106-108, 186 .
200, 229

debate with Erasmus, 19

doctrine of "two realms," 187 L

on anarchy, 172

on philosophy, 108

Magna Carta, 39

Maimonides, 88

Malby, 193

Mandelbaum, Maurice, 57

Marsilius of Padua, 104

Marx, K., 37, 46-47, 123-124, 126,

127, 195 ff.
Mathematics, 24
Memory, 4

as organic historic factor, 205

collective, 39
Messiamsm, 89-90

Christ as Messiah, 91

Mill, John Stuart,

relation to Comte, 223
Milton, John, 229
Mitchell, Lucy Sprague, 7-8
Mohammedanism, 208
Monarchy,

and constitution, 176 ff.

in Great Britain, 178 .

its role in "organic" community,

164, 169, 177

Montagu, Ashley, 141-142
Montesquieu, 119
Murphy, Gardner, 32, 129-130
Murray, Henry A., 131 n.
Mystery,

attempts to penetrate, 62 ff., 240 f.
Mysticism, 62, 64, 69-71
Myth, 97 ff.

"Natural law," 101 f , 185

Nazi (sm), 3 f., 43, 125, 221, 231, 236

Nietzsche, 67

North Atlantic Treaty Organization,

206
Nous, 81, 120

Ontology,

defined, 76
Origen, 18, 99
Original sin, 18
Outler, Albert C., 131 n.

Papacy,

medieval, 103, 170
Paradox,

of justice and love, 234
Parmenides, 122
Paul, 16, 66, 107, 171, 226

on the Resurrection, 238
Petergorsky, 193
Philo, 87
Philosophers, 49
Phronesis, 49, 60
Piety, 160

in its conflict with rationalism,

149 ff.

Plato, 4, 75, 82
Plotinus, 64, 75, 76

246

THE SELF AND THE DRAMAS OF HISTORY

Power,

American, 206

impulse to, 157 f.
Presuppositions, 114
Prometheus,

compared with "Fall," 79-80
Property, 166

French Revolution on, 193 f.

medieval attitudes toward, 183 ff.
Protestant Christianity, 96 f.

biblicism in, 108

contact with modern culture, 109

liberal, 155
Psalms, 65
Psychologists, 129 ff.

Reformation, 55-57

and the medieval church, 55-56,

105 ff., 170 ff.,' 228
Renaissance, 55-57, 105
Resurrection,

contrasted with immortality, 78,

236-237

Revelation, 66, 98-99, 156, 237
Ritschl, Albrecht, 155
Rommel, General, 43
Rosenzweig, Franz, 88
Rousseau, J. J., 165

his "General Will," 222
Russia, 206, 208
Russian Revolution, 189-190
Russell, Bertrand, 62
Rutherford, Samuel, 175, 187

Sand, George, 42, 43
Santayana, George, 70, 179
Sartre, J. P., 67-68
Science

and religion, 110-111
Sectarian Christianity, 180, 188
Sex, 101-102, 107-108
Shaffer, L. F., 11 n., 131 n.

Shakespeare, 16
Sin, 100, 233

liberal interpretation of, 155
Skinner, B. F., 132 n.
Smith, Adam, 194, 199
Smith, Norman Kemp, 117 n.
Social Sciences, 45 ff.
Socrates, 81-82
Spengler, 51
Stace, W. T., 69
Stoicism, 167
"Suffering servant," 91
Sullivan, Harry Stack, 132 n., 141
Sumner, William Graham, 120

Talman, T. L., 118 n.
Thornton, Lionel, 99
Thymos, 79, 82
Tolstoi, L., 58
Toynbee, A., 51
Trinitarian formula, 96
"Two Natures of Christ," 96
Tyndale,
on anarchy, 172

United Nations, 202 ff.
as integrating force, 206 f.

Vindidae Contra Tyrannos, 174
Voluntarism, 42
von Schleicher, 16
von Seekt, 16

Ward, Lester, 120
Washington, George, 39
White, Leslie, 133 n.
Whitehead, A. N., 228
Will, 12 ff.
Winstanley, Gerrard, 192-193

Xenophanes, 81

1 34 575